"Formalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the stamp of Goethe and Schiller should have found such a book of delicious feast, naturally makes the disparaging critic pause. In truth, we can easily see how it was. Like all the rest of Diderot's work, it breaks roughly in upon that starved formalism which had for long lain so heavily both on art and life. Its hardihood, its very license, its contempt of conventions, its presentation of common people and coarse passions and rough lives, all made it a dissolvent of the thin, dry, and frigid rules which tyrannised over the world, and interposed ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... feeling of boredom may be imagined from the way in which his performance of Macbeth was once received. To those who remembered how magnificently Betterton had played the part, the chill formalism of the new aspirant must have seemed presumptuous, and one night the contrast proved too much for a country gentleman possessed of more honesty than politeness. After watching the progress of the tragedy with growing indignation his feelings became unbearable ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... the excess of its religious ceremonial, robbed it of vital fructifying energies. The frequency and publicity of sacerdotal service, usurped the place of daily individual piety. The tendency of all outward symbolical observances, unduly multiplied, is to substitute mere formalism for fervor." ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... is the religious formalism of the Eppings and their friends. They are High Church. They discuss with astonishing vigour and at dreadful length what seems to me the most immaterial points in the Church service, and just at present an impulse ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... should condemn such a remark as a disparagement, but we should understand what it is in Emerson that the critic means. He has not the temperament of the great humorists, under whatever planet they may have been born, jovial, mercurial, or saturnine. Even his revolt against formalism is only a new fashion of composure, and sometimes comes dangerously near to moral dilettantism. The persistent identification of everything in nature with everything else sometimes bewilders, fatigues, and almost afflicts us. Though he warns us that our ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... provision as yet for helping one of the most indispensable of all educational institutions—the poet. Would that he might realize how little good the poet of genius can derive from the universities—places whose conservative formalism is even dangerous to his originality, because they try to melt him along with all the other students and pour him into their one mold. It is distressing to think of all the sums now devoted to inducing callow, overdriven sophomores to compose forced essays and doggerel, by luring them on with the ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... field of the commonplace...Doubtless form in Art is necessary to the expression of ideas and sentiments; it must be adequate, supple, free, now energetic, now graceful, delicate; sometimes even subtle and complex, but always to the exclusion of the ancient remains of decrepit formalism. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... in France at the moment when Carlyle was beginning his work in England, must be regarded as a protest against the moralizing bigotry of the classical school no less than against its antiquated formalities. The men who raised it were themselves not free from the charge of formalism; but the forms they worshipped were at least those inspired by the spontaneous genius of the artist, not the mechanical rules inherited from the traditions of the past. Nor, whatever may be the case with ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... according to the flesh, there is nothing Jewish about him which is not at the same time of general significance. The particular and national in him is always duly subordinated to the general and human. Still less was he ever identified with a party or sect. He was equally removed from the stiff formalism of the Pharisees, the loose liberalism of the Sadducees, and the inactive mysticism of the Essenes. He rose above all the prejudices, bigotries, and superstitions of his age and people, which exert their power even upon the strongest and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... patron Yahya, who accompanied him, he retired to an island in the Niger, where he founded a ribat or Moslem monastery, from which as a centre his influence spread. There was no element of heresy in his creed, which was mainly distinguished by a rigid formalism and strict obedience to the letter of the Koran and the orthodox tradition or Sunna. 'Abd-Allah imposed a penitential scourging on all converts as a purification, and enforced a regular system of discipline for every breach of the law, even on the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and trust that it will keep on recalcitrating until every unclean statue forced upon its attention in the name of art is forever disfigured. The protest of the West proves that its mind is still pure,—that it has not yet reached that plane of "culture" where modesty perishes in the frosts of formalism. ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the reaction against the narrowness and formalism of our early aims in elementary education, there is a tendency—a strong tendency—at the present time to go to the opposite extreme, and to make the elementary instrumental arts the vehicles for the fostering of real interests ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... gentleman passing my habitation on his way to the House? And he is not, he never has been, sympathetic in that direction. He sees my grief, and assumes an undertakerly air, with some notion of acting in concert, one supposes little imagining how I revolt from that crape-hatband formalism of sorrow! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... not. Titian and Bellini are each true representatives of the school of painters contemporary with them; and the difference in their artistic feeling is a consequence not so much of difference in their own natural characters as in their early education: Bellini was brought up in faith; Titian in formalism. Between the years of their births the vital religion of Venice ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... on Him the hostility of the world—that radiant white-hot sanctity in which His Sacred Humanity went clothed. Which of you convinceth me of sin?... Let him that is without sin amongst you cast the first stone at her! These were words that pierced the smooth formalism of the Scribe and the Pharisee and awoke an undying hatred. It was this, surely, that led up irresistibly to the final rejection of Him at the bar of Pilate and the choice of Barabbas in His place. "Not this man! not this ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... vied with the king in passing laws for the subjugation of Church and State, and in their thirst for revenge upon all who had been connected with Cromwell's iron government. Once more a wretched formalism—that perpetual danger to the English Church—came to the front and exercised authority over the free churches. The House of Lords was largely increased by the creation of hereditary titles and estates for ignoble men and shameless women who had flattered the king's vanity. Even the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... broader character than the other. In fact, we ought, perhaps, to make a special order by itself from the New Testament writings. They are so full of life, light, and love—they are so strong yet so tender—so pure yet so free! They have no cant of piety, no formalism, but breathe throughout a heavenly atmosphere. Their inspiration is of the highest kind ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... writes Leigh Hunt, in the 'Tatler', July 25, 1831, "displaced Quin's formalism; and in precisely the same way did Kean displace Kemble. ... Everything with Kemble was literally a 'personation'—it was a mask and a sounding-pipe. It was all external and artificial.... Kean's face is ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... importation assumed a character of its own. Liszt, who did not speak merely from hearsay, emphasises, in giving expression to his admiration of the elegant and refined manners of the Polish aristocracy, the absence of formalism ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... signify the divine element operating in his church. Just as the mediation of the prophets was necessary in the olden times to maintain constant contact with God, without which the religious exercises degenerated to mere formalism, so the living Word and Spirit of God were present in the apostolic church to elevate its service above mere human systems and forms of worship. That the Word of God and the Spirit of God are special ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... conventionalism of phrase. Schumann touches hands with the Romantic poets in their strivings in two directions. His artistic conduct, especially in his early years, is inexplicable if Jean Paul be omitted from the equation. His music rebels against the formalism which had held despotic sway over the art, and also seeks to disclose the beauty which lies buried in the world of mystery in and around us, and give expression to the multitude of emotions to which unyielding formalism ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... subsequent Jewish philosophy is slight—at most we find it in Moses and Abraham ibn Ezra, Abraham ibn Daud and Joseph ibn Zaddik—traces of his ideas are met with in the mysticism of the Kabbala. Gabirol's "Fons Vit" is a peculiar combination of logical formalism with mystic obscurity, or profundity, according to one's point of view. The latter did not appeal to pure rationalists like Ibn Daud or Maimonides, and the former seemed unconvincing, as it was employed in a lost cause. For Neo-Platonism was giving way to Aristotelianism, ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... more social revolutions of the most extraordinary kind,—signalized by the abolition of the daimiates, the suppression of the military class, the substitution of a plebeian for an aristocratic army, popular enfranchisement, the rapid formalism of a new commonalty. industrial [446] expansion, the rise of a new aristocracy of wealth, and popular representation in government! Old Japan had never developed a wealthy and powerful middle class: she had ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn |
