"Formalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been called a "Galilean peasant." The phrase sounds unpleasantly in the ears of those who adore him as their divine Lord and Master. Nevertheless it is in an important sense true. He was educated among the common people of Galilee, and had no special human training. It was an age of narrowness and formalism. The scribes and Pharisees, who sat in Moses' seat, had covered up the true meaning and spirit of the Old Testament beneath a mass of human traditions that substituted "mint, and anise, and cummin" for "the weightier matters of the law." ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... the Oxford Movement has spent itself. On the contrary, the majority of the young men who present themselves for ordination are very largely inspired by the spirit of that Movement. All the same, he perceives a danger in formalism, a resting in symbolism for its own sake. In its genesis, the Oxford Movement threw up great men, very great men, men of considerable intellectual power and a most profound spirituality; it is not to be expected, perhaps, that ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... Many men as earnestly and as tenderly have sought to waken drugged humanity and render the Kingdom of Heaven a reality. Many men have broken their hearts in the effort to save the Christian religion from the paralysis of formalism and the sleeping sickness of philosophy. It is not an easy thing to revivify a religion, nor a small thing to rescue many thousands of the human race from ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... now the formalism of acquaintanceship just made has somewhat disappeared, and they are talking easily and with freedom. Occasionally a movement of one or the other brings his head to a favorable angle, whereat the light, dropping on the freshly shaven crown, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... entitled Azul, by Ruben Dario (1864-) of Nicaragua, there triumphed in Spanish America the "movement of emancipation," the "literary page 314 revolution," which the "decadents" had already initiated in France. As romanticism had been a revolt against the empty formalism of later neo-classicism, so "decadence" was a reaction against the hard, marmoreal forms of the "Parnasse," and in its train there came inevitably a general attack on poetic traditions. This movement was hailed with joy by the young men of Latin America, who are by nature more emotional ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... but these preserve a strong alien flavour in their mental attitude and in their diction. They are the songs of fighting men, songs that were sung on horseback, songs of war and its sufferings. These songs have nothing of the excessive formalism and aestheticism of the Chinese, but give expression to simple emotions in unpolished language with a direct appeal. The epic of the Turkish peoples had clearly been developed already, and in north China it produced a rudimentary ballad ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... new system the ecclesiastical machinery which, at first, brought peace and order, soon developed into a barren autonomy and gave rise to rigid formalism in religion, with its consequent baneful results upon the spiritual and moral character of the people. The Established Church had attained the height of its security and power, with exclusive privileges conferred by the legislature. That body had turned over to the "government within ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... said, "think of Judge Custis! Have you not made home cold to him by this formalism? We must study men, and please them according to their tastes, and therein lies our joy; else we are false to the companionship God gave us to man for. Yield to your husband's boyish-heartedness; fly with him, like the mate by the bird! He has repented; welcome him to your love again, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... sacrament of love and faith and sorrow that makes Christ the very life-blood of our being and doing? And has not James Marvyn also his lesson to be taught? We foresee him drawn gradually back by Mary from his recoil against Puritan formalism to a perception of how every creed is pliant and plastic to a beautiful nature, of how much charm there may be in an hereditary faith, even if it have ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... and logic of moral value, 72. Virtues as verified rules of life, 73. The material and formal aspects of morality, 74. Materialism and formalism due to exaggeration, 75. The general importance of the conflict between the material and formal motives, 76. Duty identified with the formal motive, 76. Formalism less severely condemned, 77. The five economies of interest, 77. Summary of virtues ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... dispensation, with its legal formalism, was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The new dispensation was—"But I say unto you, Love your enemies." Enmity begets enmity. It is as senseless as it is godless. It runs through all his teachings and ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... it was mainly organised and stimulated by the Dissenters, and that section of Churchmen who most resembled them. The High Church party, the descendants of the old connection which had rallied round Sacheverell, had subsided into formalism, and shrank from any very active ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... return to formalism and a reactionary development has been the change in what is known as the Poor Man's Court of New York City. It was originally planned as a court where the client or man unlearned in the law could come in to sue ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... Dante, her Andrea del Sarto, her Michael Angelo, her Leonardo da Vinci, her Savonarola, her Giotto, or the group who followed Giotto's picture. Florence had a marvelous energy—re-lease experience. All our industrial formalism, our conventionalized young manhood, our schematized universities, are instruments of balk and thwart, are machines to produce protesting abnormality, to block efficiency. So the problem of industrial labor is one with the problem of the discontented business man, ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... sixteenth century the tea-room afforded a welcome respite from labour to the fierce warriors and statesmen engaged in the unification and reconstruction of Japan. In the seventeenth century, after the strict formalism of the Tokugawa rule had been developed, it offered the only opportunity possible for the free communion of artistic spirits. Before a great work of art there was no distinction between daimyo, samurai, and commoner. ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... itself beautiful, and Wagner has made it immortal; only he at his ripest and best could combine in an opera-chorus such strength with such sweetness, combine the directness of a part-song with the free play of parts, with never a touch of formalism. It must be held to be one of the most superb things in an opera which is as nearly perfect as ever opera is ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... connected, or supposed to be connected, with religious belief, to the dogmas and decrees of the Church and the authority of the early Fathers, and wasting the understanding and intellect in dry formalism or subtle but barren controversies. This conception fails to appreciate the vast labour of thought bestowed by leading minds on the attempt to unravel the mass of ecclesiastical teaching which had twined round the innermost lives of themselves and their fellow-Christians, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... here makes its first conscious and triumphant appearance in the history of art." With the work of the great Jan Van Eyck in one's mind's eye, of course this will appear one of those little lapses of memory so convenient to German national sentiment. "Everything that, according to our aesthetic formalism based on the antique, we should consider beautiful, is sacrificed to truth." (I have already pointed out that this use of the word "truth" in matters of art constitutes a fallacy)[83] "And yet our taste must bow before the imperishable fidelity to nature displayed in these forms, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... droop already with the malady of dejection. The divine wisdom which knows the secrets of all hearts and their necessities infinitely various, shall exact obedience according to no adamantine law: it loves not the jots and tittles of formalism, nor the pretensions of those who would cast all things in one mould. From those made perfect, from the saints whose links with earth are almost severed, whose sight begins to pierce gross matter through, it may accept prostration and endless contrite tears, knowing that to these, upon the ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith |
