Quotes About Formlessness

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

The ultimate skill in taking up a strategic position is to have no form.

La perfection, la sainteté recherchée par les taoïstes, c'est l'union mystique avec le tao éternel: c'est 's'effacer vivant dans cette présence originelle et souveraine qui enveloppe tout sans être jamais enveloppé', dans le 'sans forme qui engendre toutes les formes, dans le tao qui possède une vie éternelle'. Et c'est atteindre, du même coup, l'immortalité.

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!

If you find an idea without form, please let me know because I would love to take a picture of it.

Many of us are not consciously aware of such fears. With enough surface bravado to fool the people we meet, we fool ourselves as well. But the memory of formlessness is never far beneath. So we hasten to try on life's uniforms

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

In order to compensate for its chaotic formlessness, a mass always produces a "Leader," who almost infallibly becomes the victim of his own inflated ego-consciousness, as numerous examples in history show.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

The three poisons are exactly what creates the three realms of samsara. Attachment creates the realms of desire. Aversion creates the realms of form. Indifference creates the realms of formlessness.

The swing of art is circular, from form to formalism, from formalism to formlessness, from formlessness to form again.

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.

I looked at the earth, and it was formless and void; I looked to the heavens, and they had no light.