Quotes About Form

en terre d'Islam,] la distinction entre le sacré et le profane n'existe normalement que dans l'usage que l'on fait des œuvres d'art et non dans leurs formes : une maison n'est pas bâtie dans un style différent de celui d'une mosquée.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

I am thinking of Achilles' grief, he said. That famous, terrible, grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Form is everything. Without it you've got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry—sincere, maybe, for what that's worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry.

Capitalism engenders identity politics. It does so by stripping away the content of all particular identity by imposing the commodity form on every particularity. This commodity form is not a universal but an empty form that necessitates total conformity.

A figure with curves always offers a lot of interesting angles.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

A dream of form in days of thought'--who is it who says that? I forget; but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me.

But whether I become a believer or remain an agnostic, my belief or disbelief must derive its source from within, not from without. I, myself, must create its symbols. The transcendental is that which produces its own form. I will never discover its secret if I do not find it in my own heart; if I do not possess it already I shall never be able to acquire it.

For life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us.

In every sphere of life, form is the beginning of things. […] Forms are the food of faith, cried Newman in one of those great moments of sincerity that made us admire the know the man. […] The Creeds are believed, not because they are rational, but because they are repeated.

To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One tastes it, and that is quite enough – more than enough, I should imagine.

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour--that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

We live in a world when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

I can not help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and color tell us of form and color-that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist more completely than it ever reveals hi m

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament. It makes us pay too high a price for its wares, and we purchase the meanest of its secrets at a cost that is monstrous and infinite.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there.

Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly Contrives. In all creation, be assured, There is no death - no death, but only change And innovation; what we men call birth Is but a different new beginning; death Is but to cease to be the same. Perhaps This may have moved to that and that to this, Yet still the sum of things remains the same. Nothing can last, I do believe, for long In the same image.

I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish and I don't suppose I have ever come much closer to saying 'Tra la la' as I did the lathering for I was feeling in mid season form this morning.

I asked of every thing if it had something more, something more than shape and form, and I learned that way that nothing is empty-- everything is a box, a train, a boat loaded with implications, every foot that walked along a path left a telegram written in the stone, and clothes in the washing water dripped out their whole existence. -from Investigations

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

Whatever the source of emotion that drives me to create, I want to give it a form which has some connection with the visible world, even if it is only to wage war on that world....I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.