Formulatory Quotes & Sayings

The German people are an orderly, vain, deeply sentimental and rather insensitive people. They seem to feel at their best when they are singing in chorus, saluting or obeying orders. — H.G.Wells

Little men," he once said, "spend their days in pursuit of such things. I know from experience that at the moment of their deaths they see their lives shattered before them like glass. I've seen them die. They fall away as if they have been pushed, and the expressions on their faces are those of the most unbelieving surprise. Not so, the man who knows the virtues and lives by them. The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn't matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we may stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God. — Mark Helprin

While reading writers of great formulatory power - Henry James, Santayana, Proust - I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C'mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer's cramp while reading. — Joseph Epstein

Speech is as a pump, by which we raise and pour out the water from the great lake of Thought,
whither it flows back again. — John Sterling

Epicurus as a moral empiricist felt that our immediate feelings are far more cogent and authoritative guides to the good life than abstract maxims, verbal indoctrination, or even the voice of reason itself. Hence he based his ethics on nature, not on convention or on reason. — Epicurus

If your cat falls out of a tree, go indoors to laugh. — Pat Hitchcock

Dear young people of every language and culture, a high and exhilarating task awaits you: that of becoming men and women capable of solidarity, peace and love of life, with respect for everyone. Become craftsmen of a new humanity, where brothers and sisters - members all of the same family - are able at last to live in peace. — Pope John Paul II

The artist must operate on the assumption that the public consists in the highest order of individual; that he is civilized, cultured, and highly sensitive both to emotional and intellectual contexts. And while the whole public most certainly does not consist in that sort of individual, still the tendency of art is to create such a public - to lift the level of perceptivity, to increase and enrich the average individual's store of values ... I believe that it is in a certain devotion to concepts of truth that we discover values. — Ben Shahn

In the dark morning silence, I placed a gun to her head. She wore red dresses, but now she lay dead. — Dwight Yoakam

The basic trouble with the church today is her unworthy concept of God ... Our religion is weak because our God is weak ... Christianity at any given time is strong or weak depending on her concept of God. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

Clearly there was no headway to be made in an argument when one's opponent was insane. — Lisa Kleypas

'Jaws' was the ultimate man vs. nature movie, and it was a movie that was basically three people against the elements, so that was the biggest influence on 'Frozen.' — Adam Green