Just education forms the man. [ Gay ]
Alas! that dreams are only dreams!
That fancy cannot give
A lasting beauty to those forms.
Which scarce a moment live! [ Rufus Dawes ]
When darkness gathers over all,
And the last tottering pillars fall,
Take the poor dust Thy mercy warms,
And mould it into heavenly forms. [ O. W. Holmes ]
A sturdy oak, which nature forms
To brave a hundred winter's storms.
While round its head the whirlwinds blow.
Remains with root infix'd below:
When fell'd to earth, a ship it sails
Through dashing waves and driving gales
And now at sea, again defies
The threatening clouds and howling skies. [ Hoole ]
For forms of government let fools contest;
Whate'er is best administered is best. [ Pope ]
So many ghosts, and forms of fright,
Have started from their graves tonight.
They have driven sleep from mine eyes away;
I will go down to the chapel and pray. [ Longfellow ]
To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. [ Bryant ]
'Tis education forms the common mind;
Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined. [ Alexander Pope ]
Custom forms us all.
Our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed belief
Are consequences of our place of birth. [ Hill ]
Her years
Were ripe, they might make six-and-twenty springs;
But there are forms which Time to touch forbears,
And turns aside his scythe to vulgar things. [ Byron ]
Gifts come from above in their own peculiar forms. [ Goethe ]
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery. [ Victor Hugo ]
Birds, the free tenants of earth, air, and ocean,
Their forms all symmetry, their motion grace,
In plumage delicate and beautiful,
Thick without burthen, close as fish's scales.
Or loose as full blown poppies on the gale;
With wings that seem as they'd a soul within them.
They bear their owners with such sweet enchantment. [ James Montgomery ]
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. [ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream ]
Man forms himself in his own interior, and nowhere else. [ Lacordaire ]
Man forms and educates the world, but woman educates man. [ Julie Burow ]
The ideal itself is but truth clothed in the forms of art. [ Octave Feuillet ]
Imitation forms our manners, our opinions, our very lives. [ John Weiss ]
Social usages: a respect sincere or feigned for absurd forms.
Society develops wit, but its contemplation alone forms genius. [ Mme. de Stael ]
It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age. [ Macaulay ]
Our own heart, and not other men's opinions, forms our true honor. [ Coleridge ]
Their little minim forms arrayed in all the tricksy pomp of fairy pride. [ Drake ]
Talent forms itself in secret; character, in the great current of the world. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do afar off. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Objects imperfectly discerned take forms from the hope or fear of the beholder. [ Johnson ]
Grace is in garments, in movements, and manners; beauty in the nude and in forms. [ Joubert ]
Grief has two forms of expression, laughter and tears; and tears are not the saddest. [ L. Blanc ]
Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? In him alone. Can nature show as fair? [ Byron ]
The essence of humor is sensibility; warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence. [ Carlyle ]
Refined taste forms a good critic; but genius is further necessary to form the poet or the orator. [ Blair ]
There is no arena is which vanity displays itself under such a variety of forms as in conversation. [ Pascal ]
The faculties of our souls differ as widely as the features of our faces and the forms of our frames. [ J. G. Holland ]
Man is the metre of all things, the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms. [ Aristotle ]
As wholesome meat corrupteth to little worms, so good forms and orders corrupt into a number of petty observances. [ Bacon ]
Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms. [ W. Godwin ]
It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forevermore. [ Chapin ]
The mother forms the first rudiments of the infant mind, and instills into the infant bosom the first principles of virtuous action. [ J. Iredell ]
Death is not an end, but a transition crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration - the secret alembics of vitality. [ Chapin ]
The angels may have wider spheres of action, may have nobler forms of duty; but right with them and with us is one and the same thing. [ Chapin ]
Rightly, poetry is organic. We cannot know things by words and writing, but only by taking a central position in the universe and living in its forms. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Government arrogates to itself that it alone forms men.... Everybody knows that Government never began anything. It is the whole world that thinks and governs. [ Wendell Phillips ]
Exaggeration is not only one form of falsehood, it is one of its worst forms: since the swollen and contagious body gains admission by walking in upon healthy legs. [ Berz ]
Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order. [ Hare ]
The main thing in writing is to have distinct, and clear, and well-marshalled ideas, and then to express them simply and without affectation. This forms what we may call the bones of a good style. [ John Stuart Blackie, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]
Heaven is the day of which grace is the dawn; the rich, ripe fruit of which grace is the lovely flower; the inner shrine of that most glorious temple to which grace forms the approach and outer court. [ Rev. Dr. Guthrie ]
Grace is in garments, in movements, in manners: beauty in the nude, and in forms. This is true of bodies; but when we speak of feelings, beauty is in their spirituality, and grace in their moderation. [ Joubert ]
Faith in the hereafter is as necessary for the intellectual as the moral character; and to the man of letters, as well as to the Christian, the present forms but the slightest portion of his existence. [ Southey ]
The essence of humour is sensibility, warm, tender, fellow-feeling with all forms of existence; and unless seasoned and purified by humour, sensibility is apt to run wild, will readily corrupt into disease, falsehood, or, in one word, sentimentality. [ Carlyle ]
In Athens the ladies were not gaudily but simply arrayed, and we doubt whether any ladies ever excited more admiration. So also the noble old Roman matrons, whose superb forms were gazed on delightedly by men worthy of them, were always very plainly dressed. [ George D. Prentice ]
All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is taste. Others have the same love in such excess that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is art. [ Emerson ]
He is wise who can instruct us and assist us in the business of daily virtuous living; he who trains us to see old truth under academic formularies may be wise or not, as it chances, but we love to see wisdom in unpretending forms, to recognise her royal features under a week-day vesture. [ Carlyle ]
Moral beauty is the basis of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art brings it out, and gives it more transparent forms. It is here that art, when it knows well its power and resources, engages in a struggle with nature in which it may have the advantage. [ Victor Cousin ]
Art neither belongs to religion, nor to ethics; but, like these, it brings us nearer to the Infinite, one of the forms of which it manifests to us. God is the source of all beauty, as of all truth, of all religion, of all morality. The most exalted object, therefore, of art is to reveal in its own manner the sentiment of the Infinite. [ Victor Cousin ]
Society is infected with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom no public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight. [ Emerson ]
Over Under. These words have various meanings besides the designation of mere locality, and are often misapplied. The terms under oath,
under hand and seal,
under arms,
under his own signature,
etc., are fully established and authorized forms of expression, which do not concern the relative positions of the persons and things indicated, but are idiomatic. Hence, over his own signature,
is an unjustifiable phrase, despite the fact that the signature is really at the bottom of the instrument signed. [ Pure English, Hackett And Girvin, 1884 ]
Always the idea of unbroken quiet broods around the grave. It is a port where the storms of life never beat, and the forms that have been tossed on its chafing waves lie quiet forever more. There the child nestles as peacefully as ever it lay in its mother's arms, and the workman's hands lie still by his side, and the thinker's brain is pillowed in silent mystery, and the poor girl's broken heart is steeped in a balm that extracts its secret woe, and is in the keeping of a charity that covers all blame. [ Chapin ]
No process is so fatal as that which would cast all men in one mould. Every human being is intended to have a character of his own, to be what no other is, to do what no other can do. Our common nature is to be unfolded in unbounded diversities. It is rich enough for infinite manifestations. It is to wear innumerable forms of beauty and glory. Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influences to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach. [ Channing ]