Best Formalities Quotes & Sayings

The religion brings many people together, so some degree of discipline is necessary, of course, but if you focus too much on formalities, you can lose sight of your original purpose. Things like precepts and doctrines are, ultimately, just expedients. The important thing is not the frame itself but what is inside the frame. — Haruki Murakami

Certain formalities. It is a great delight also to seal up a love-letter, and, slowly putting on one's hat and coat, to go softly out of the house and to carry the treasure to the post. — Anton Chekhov

You got to set your mind right and the rest will come to you naturally. No restrictions, no hang-ups, no stupid rules, no formalities, no forbidden fruit - just everyone getting and giving as much as he and she can. — Ray Charles

You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That'€s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. — Octave Mirbeau

He grinned again. We'd only been seeing each other for a few weeks now, but this easy give-and-take still surprised me. From that very first day in my room, I felt like we'd somehow skipped the formalities of the Beginning of a Relationship: those awkward moments when you're not all over each other and are still feeling out the other person's boundaries and limits. Maybe this was because we'd been circling each other for a while before he finally catapulted through my window. But if I let myself think about it much - and I didn't - I had flashes of realising that I'd been comfortable with him even at the very start. Clearly, he'd been comfortable with me, grabbing my hand as he had that first day. As if he knew, even then, that we'd be here now. — Sarah Dessen

What if ... all the rules and ways we lay down in our heads, don't even exist at all? What if we only believe that they're there, because we want to think that they're there? All the formalities of morality and the decisions that we see ourselves making in order to be better (or the best) ... what if we think we've got it all under control - but we don't? What if the path for you, is one that you would never dare take because you never saw yourself going that way? And then what if you realized that one day - would you take the path for you? Or would you choose to believe in your rules and your reasons? Your moralities and your hopes? What if your own hope, and your own morality - are going the other way? — C. JoyBell C.

Under this law (Controlled Substances Act) a bureaucrat-usually not elected-decides whether or not a substance is dangerous and how dangerous that substance is. There's no more messing around with legislatures, presidents, or other bothersome formalities. When MDMA (ecstasy) was made illegal in 1986, no elected official voted on that. It was done "in house." People are now in jail because they did something that an administrator declared was wrong. — Peter McWilliams

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the sophisticated deplore these formalities as 'empty,' 'meaningless,' or 'dishonest,' and scorn to use them. No matter how 'pure' their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best. — Robert A. Heinlein

And now we have the formalities over, we'll have the National Anthems. — Brian Moore

Fiestas always began as if they were being held in a parlor, amid teacups. — Warren Eyster

As to the new pope, scarcely had he completed the formalities of etiquette which his exaltation imposed upon him, and paid to each man the price of his simony, when from the height of the Vatican he cast his eyes upon Europe, a vast political game of chess, which he cherished the hope of directing at the will of his own genius. — Alexandre Dumas

There are infinite of these subtle trifles, and others more subtle than these, of notions, relations, instants, formalities, quiddities, haecceities, which no one can perceive without a Lynceus whose eyes could look through a stone wall and discover those things through the thickest darkness that never were. — Erasmus

The officers do not beat the men; the officers and men receive equal treatment. Soldiers are free to hold meetings and speak out. Trivial formalities have been done away with and the accounts are open for all to inspect. — Mao Zedong

Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that. — Suzanne Vega

Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should marry her? Something like that is the truth; certainly nearer the truth than merely to record those vague, inchoate sentiments of interest of which I was so immediately conscious. It was as if I had known her for many years already; enjoyed happiness with her and suffered sadness. I was conscious of that, as of another life, nostalgically remembered. Then, at that moment, to be compelled to go through all the paraphernalia of introduction, of 'getting to know' one another by means of the normal formalities of social life, seemed hardly worth while. We knew one another already; the future was determinate. — Anthony Powell

It is superstitious to put one's hope in formalities, but arrogant to refuse to submit to them. — Blaise Pascal

We've resorted to formalities suddenly? Am I to assume we haven't been
intimate enough for you to call me by my first name?" Despite his casual tone, his eyes suggested so much more. "Perhaps I should rectify that. — Melissa Lurquette

They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy — Alice Munro

Thieves are not so bad, and killing wears all possible costumes. There is no death, no murder that is better than any other. If you can kill me, the manner hardly bears consideration. You want to kill your own father, and you think it will make your sleep easier for the next seventy years if you can say you did it honorably. But your honor is blackened by patricide, and no amount of high-sounding formalities will make it white again. — Catherynne M Valente

If the only way a library can offer an Internet exhibit about the New Deal is to hire a lawyer to clear the rights to every image and sound, then the copyright system is burdening creativity in a way that has never been seen before because there are no formalities. — Lawrence Lessig

Why should Canada, wild and unsettled as it is, impress us as an older country than the States, unless because her institutions are old? All things appeared to contend there, as I have implied, with a certain rust of antiquity, such as forms on old armor and iron guns,
the rust of conventions and formalities. It is said that the metallic roofs of Montreal and Quebec keep sound and bright for forty years in some cases. But if the rust was not on the tinned roofs and spires, it was on the inhabitants and their institutions. — Henry David Thoreau

In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities. — Mark Twain

The sweetness of life lies in dispensing with formalities. — Muhammad Ali

Psychobabble is ... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems. — Richard Rosen

The formal religions are often overdone, with useless formalities, immature psychological notions, and pompous authorities. — Thomas Moore

As a writer given to the old formalities of rhyme and meter, I sometimes feel endangered these days. — X.J. Kennedy

I am at your service, my lady, I said, standing and releasing her hand. For the first time in my life I understood the true purpose of this sort of formal greeting. It gives you a script to follow when you have absolutely no idea what to say. — Patrick Rothfuss

Why did every human concern clog itself up in a tangle of routines, formalities, disciplines, imperatives? Why couldn't one be free? Really free? Guarding one's freedom, wasn't freedom at all. Why couldn't one win one's freedom for good and all, and get on with life? — H.G.Wells

To be risen with Christ means not only that one has a choice and that one may live by a higher law - the law of grace and love - but that one must do so. The first obligation of the Christian is to maintain their freedom from all superstitions, all blind taboos and religious formalities, indeed from all empty forms of legalism. — Thomas Merton

This incessant creation of restrictive laws and regulations,surrounding the pettiest actions of existence with the most complicated formalities, inevitably has for its result the confining within narrower and narrower limits of the sphere in which the citizen may move freely. — Gustav Le Bon

[To] me organized religion, the formalities and routines, [is] like being marched in formation to look at a sunset. — John D. MacDonald

No man is in love when he marries. He may have loved before; I have even heard he has sometimes loved after: but at the time never. There is something in the formalities of the matrimonial preparations that drive away all the little cupidons. — Fanny Burney

There were the meaningless greetings the humans called "formalities": insincere inquiries into the state of health, nebulous benedictions and hopes for past well-being; all compensations for the lack of human Mediators. — Larry Niven

More dangerous than being in a house full of vampires? I think I'll take my chances, Mr. Fallinsworth."

"I think we're way past formalities here since my cock has been inside that hot, wet, delicious body of yours. — K.L. Kreig