Formlessness Quotes & Sayings

Happy is the spirit that attains to the perfect formlessness at the time of prayer. — Evagrius Ponticus

There's a series of sculptures there by Michelangelo that you should see. They are called The Captives. Out of a great formless mass of stone, the figures of slaves emerge: heads, shoulders, torsos, straining toward freedom but still held fast in the stone. There are souls like that, Reyes. There are souls that try to carve themselves from their own formlessness. — Mary Doria Russell

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life — Martin Amis

To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity. It seemed a worthwhile goal for prospective saints and flagellants. The new asceticism. All the visionary possibilities of the fast. To feed on the plants and animals of earth. To expand and wallow. I cherished his size, the formlessness of it, the sheer vulgar pleasure, his sense of being overwritten prose. Somehow it was the opposite of death. — Don DeLillo

Our larger body is eternity. Eventually, we return to the source in its undifferentiated form, in its absolute form, which is both form and formlessness, but we exist in that sea all the time. — Frederick Lenz

My time is limited. It is thence that one fine day, when all nature smiles and shines, the rack lets loose its black unforgettable cohorts and sweeps away the blue for ever. My situation is truly delicate. What fine things, what momentous things, i am going to miss through fear, fear of falling back into the old error, fear of not finishing in time, fear of revelling, for the last time, in a last outpouring of misery, impotence and hate. The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness. — Samuel Beckett

Love has its own independent form and formlessness. When someone loves you be gratiful for it. If they stop loving be grateful for that. If they love another, let them love! — Frederick Lenz

When the spirit is understood, then life becomes not at all common, but a constant magical circus in which you see yourself reflected in all forms and all formlessness. — Frederick Lenz

Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby, you can be the director of the opponent's fate. — Christopher Moore

The monk's ultimate goal is direct union with the Godhead. But to aim at that goal is to miss it altogether. His task is to rid himself of ego so that consciousness, once its usual discordant mental content is dumped out of it through ritual prayer and meditation, may experience nonself as a living formlessness and emptiness into which God may come, if it please Him to come. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

One who transmuted things from formlessness and shapelessness into that-which-was-not-real, but without which the real would have no meaning — Neil Gaiman

What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language. — Michael Ondaatje

I'm in no position to hand down any advice," he said, "but there's a rule I follow when I don't know what to do."
"A rule?"
"If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn't, go for the one without form. That's my rule. Whenever I run into a wall I follow that rule, and it always works out. Even if it's hard going at the time. — Haruki Murakami

When the power of the shift rips the human body apart and transforms it into its new shape, there lives a second, less than a second, a mere shimmer of time when the mind is without a home, no body to call its own. Existence is painless in there, nothing but formlessness beyond understanding. A secret place, it contains nothing but the essence of self, a lost self. In the fire of pain, Colton found a whisper of that place, its ghost, its echo, and from that echo he withdrew a thread of deepest black. — Finn Marlowe

One day the play ends and the screen goes blank. There is nothing. Everything returns to its original formlessness - and then another dream begins. — Frederick Lenz

Learn to move fast and adapt or you will be eaten. The best way to avoid this fate is to assume formlessness. No predator alive can attack what it cannot see. OBSERVANCE — Robert Greene

Nature has no consolation for us. Out of her formlessness issues forms which return to formlessness, - that is all. The plant becomes clay; the clay becomes a plant. When the plant turns to clay, what becomes of the vibration which was its life? Does it go on existing viewlessly, like the forces that shape spectres of frondage in the frost upon a window-pane? — Lafcadio Hearn

I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company ... The novel is 'about' a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn't true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can't read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. Not one of my cultivated and literary friends saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence. — Doris Lessing

Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit in with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all ways and is bound by none and, likewise, uses any techniques which serve its end. — Bruce Lee

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise. — Jeanette Winterson

To change formlessness to form requires massive discrimination. — John Zande

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse. — George Eliot

The swing of art is circular, from form to formalism, from formalism to formlessness, from formlessness to form again. — Austin O'Malley

The inner life has its soft and gentle beauty; an abstract formlessness as well as a subtle charm. I often consider myself as a figure in a foggy painting: faltering lines, insecure distances, and a merging of greys and blacks. An emotion or a mood - a mere wisp of color - is shaded off and made to spread until it becomes one with all that surrounds it. — Virginia Woolf

Painting done under pressure by artists without the necessary talent can only give rise to formlessness, as painting is a profession that requires peace of mind. — Titian

Large amount of resources and more individuals in your organization do not necessarily equate to victory over your opponent if you have lost the advantage of formlessness. — Kambiz Mostofizadeh

What is a body that casts no shadow? Nothing, a formlessness, two-dimensional, a comic-strip character. If I deny my own profound relationship with evil I deny my own reality. I cannot do, or make; I can only undo, unmake. — Ursula K. Le Guin

All that is limited by form, semblance, sound, color is called object. Among them all, man alone is more than an object. Though, like objects, he has form and semblance, He is not limited to form. He is more. He can attain to formlessness. When he is beyond form and semblance, beyond "this" and "that," where is the comparison with another object? Where is the conflict? What can stand in his way? He will rest in his eternal place which is no-place. He will be hidden in his own unfathomable secret. His nature sinks to its root in the One. His vitality, his power hide in secret Tao. — Zhuangzi

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart. — Ralph Ellison

To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour. — Gerhard Richter

Every session attended by the analyst must have no history and no future. What is 'known' about the patient is of no further consequence: it is either false or irrelevant. If it is 'known' by patient and analyst, it is obsolete ... The only point of importance in any session is the unknown. Nothing must be allowed to distract from intuiting that. In any session, evolution takes place. Out of the darkness and formlessness something evolves. — Wilfred Bion

When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For a while, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness. — Adrienne Rich

Dharma is the Truth that all of existence is. It does not disagree with anything. It is the perception of existence in its purest formlessness. — Frederick Lenz

Nexus
I wrote stubbornly into the evening.
At the window, a giant praying mantis
rubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,
begging vacantly with pale eyes;
and the commas leapt at me like worms
or miniature scythes blackened with age.
the praying mantis screeched louder,
his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.
I walked outside;
the grass hissed at my heels.
Up ahead in the lapping darkness
he wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,
a brontosaurus, a poet. — Rita Dove

People don't mind immoral messages. They don't mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex's sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they can't stand is to be told it all doesn't matter, they can't stand formlessness. — Doris Lessing

When God was creating heaven and earth, and there came what seemed like a problem: darkness and formlessness, He did not talk problem, instead, He spoke solution: 'And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light'. May we instead of making problems our speech, think and speak solutions! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Not every painter has a gift for painting, in fact, many painters are disappointed when they meet with difficulties in art. Painting done under pressure by artists without the necessary talent can only give rise to formlessness, as painting is a profession that requires peace of mind. The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting ... — Titian

Those of my critics who declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the meandering formlessness of these notes. — Sherwood Anderson