Top 900 Formal Quotes & Sayings

It is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn these into what look like moral theories. Philosophers tend to be ravished by the formal beauty of such theories, and they don't pay much attention to the fact that our human limitations make them pretty useless in practice, while the simple point about instrumental reasoning is too shallow to be of much real moral interest.

Never wear a button-down collared shirt with a double-breasted suit. The more formal double-breasted suit looks best with the more formal spread or long-point collar.

It is difficult to remember just how formal middle-class life was in the 1930's and '40s. I wore a suit and tie at home from the age of 18. One dressed for breakfast. One lived in a very formal way, and emotions were not paraded. And my childhood was not unusual.

In other words, the propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in character - that is, they do not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. Accordingly we may say that philosophy is a department of logic. For we will see that the characteristic mark of a purely logical enquiry, is that it is concerned with the formal consequences of our definitions and not with questions of empirical fact.

I take it that computational processes are both symbolic and formal. They are symbolic because they are defined over representations, and they are formal because they apply to representations, in virtue of (roughly) the syntax of the representations.

The job of formal methods is to elucidate the assumptions upon which formal correctness depends.

I don't do formal debates, because formal debates where you have two people up on a stage in equal status, and each of them is given 20 minutes to give their point of view, and then 10 minutes for a rebuttal, or whatever, that creates the illusion that you really do have here two equal points of view of equal scientific standing.

There is an inherent dissonancebetween the quasi-formal world of computer programs - defining the programmed machine in each system - and the non-formal problem world of the system requirements.

I didn't have much of a formal education myself.

I don't even have a formal fans association.

In [Aristotle's] formal logic, thought is organized in a manner very different from that of the Platonic dialogue. In this formal logic, thought is indifferent toward its objects. Whether they are mental or physical, whether they pertain to society or to nature, they become subject to the same general laws of organization, calculation, and conclusion - but they do so as fungible signs or symbols, in abstraction from their particular "substance." This general quality (quantitative quality) is the precondition of law and order - in logic as well as in society - the price of universal control.

On weekends, the U.S. was casual; in Italy the weekend was very formal. I came to understand that weekends are about free time, and that one could wear high quality, tasteful products that weren't so formal.

Words are cold and formal things.

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

Formal art is essentially rational.

I believe I'm very conscious of exactly what I'm doing. I'm auditioning lines of dialogue, and I'm interrogating whether the lines would translate from Russian into English the right way. The English that results can perhaps seem somewhat more formal than colloquial, but not so formal as to feel academic.

After love a formal feeling comes.

I want a formal apology from the mayor.

A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used.

While teleprompter use is very common for politicians and others giving formal speeches, Biden is the first candidate to regularly use one outside of formal speeches, such as during press conferences.

True leadership is moral authority, not formal authority. Leadership is a choice, not a position. The choice is to follow universal timeless principles, which will build trust and respect from the entire organization. Those with formal authority alone will lose this trust and respect.

I've never had anything as formal as vocal lessons.

Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful cannot lead to all truths.

Lunch is formal - that's when my husband and I have our dates. And dinner is formal: we sit down every day with the kids at seven o' clock.

When I enrolled in college at age 19, I had a total of eight years of formal classroom education. As a result, I was not comfortable with formal lectures and receiving regular homework assignments.

The right answer on raises is you have to be formal. You have to be formal to save your own culture.

While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate.

Every prime minister has a whole series of networks, and there are official formal networks and there are unofficial informal networks. I'm lucky in that I have good official formal networks, starting with my own office, the leadership group, the cabinet and the party room.

I don't think that people are disinterested or uninterested in politics. I think very often they are disengaged from the formal political process. To some extent they are suspicious or even despairing of formal politics as a means to give expression and effect to what they want.

My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces.

I've never known anyone who has fallen into sin and been successfully restored by the formal church structure. Nor have I ever seen a formal church structure wisely deal with sin, enabling ministry to continue without interruption.

My father gave me formal education in raagdari. He died in Lahore in 1964 when I was 13. I was in the tenth year of school, and my father's brother took me into the qawwali ensemble and started giving me formal education in qawwali.

My work is formal, not based on psychology.

Every day I'd say I look different. Sometimes I look really formal, sometimes I love the classic Stella McCartney, Chloe Sevigny and Gwyneth Paltrow thing. Other days I like being rock star and wearing leather jackets and studs. I love wearing Burberry - it's the perfect combination of formal and punky.

My formal education as an extension to my college degree in journalism was the time that I spent working with the student newspaper. I would argue that my greatest education occurred by working for the student newspaper. It wasn't necessarily the classroom work that made my formal education special. It was the idea that I had the opportunity to practice it before I went into the real world.

I am not a dancer. In fact, I have no formal training in dance.

There is so much closed-mindedness, there is so much closed-off thought, there is so much bigotry and prejudice within knowledge that it, I think, is stunting the actual intelligence growth of our population. Not our capabilities but our actual intelligence growth because all of the stigma that's attached to people that don't have formal educations as opposed to those who do. But the people that have formal educations have been programmed and indoctrinated in many cases, not in all the disciplines.

It has been a long road from Plato's Meno to the present, but it is perhaps encouraging that most of the progress along that road has been made since the turn of the twentieth century, and a large fraction of it since the midpoint of the century. Thought was still wholly intangible and ineffable until modern formal logic interpreted it as the manipulation of formal tokens. And it seemed still to inhabit mainly the heaven of Platonic ideals, or the equally obscure spaces of the human mind, until computers taught us how symbols could be processed by machines.

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

Morality, when formal, devours.

I know that one of the things that I really did to push myself was to write more formal poems, so I could feel like I was more of a master of language than I had been before. That was challenging and gratifying in so many ways. Then with these new poems, I've gone back to free verse, because it would be easy to paint myself into a corner with form. I saw myself becoming more opaque with the formal poems than I wanted to be. It took me a long time to work back into free verse again. That was a challenge in itself. You're always having to push yourself.

I have never been impressed by the formal schools of ethics.

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit.

Formal is formal. I can't wear sneakers all the time. Sometimes, I wear other shoes. It's not my challenge designing formal - it's so boring - but it's still important. I sell a lot of classic black sneakers made from every material because everyone loves black, and if you mix and match material, you get an opera.

Most poetry is very formal, but when a modern poet is formal he gets more attention for it than old poets did.

One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

What is it about wearing a tuxedo or that little black dress, that makes us feel confident, beautiful, splendid, even invincible? We put on formal wear and suddenly we become extraordinary. On the days when you feel low and invisible, why not try this on for size: imagine you are wearing a fantastic tailored tuxedo or a stunning formal gown. And then proceed with your day.

I have no formal culinary training, right.

I felt the need to unlearn my formal education.

[The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that ] the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States.

I think the time of the formal dinners is over.

There isn't a formal definition of success.

Of all formal things in the world, a clipped hedge is the most formal; and of all the informal things in the world, a forest tree is the most informal.

As more and more money is coming into the formal economy, one can look at more attractive tax rates and lower tax slabs. Even if half the people who were in the informal sector move in to the formal economy and more taxes get collected, more money can be spent on the welfare.

We have next to consider the formal definition of virtue.

The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

To be an ally is a formal military alliance. And we have a formal military alliance in NATO. But we are partners with other countries all across the world. And they're - they will be a partner.

I hate perfect centerpieces and formal tablescapes.

As a physician, we are taught that learning and education never stop - they are lifelong. I think education comes in various forms: formal, informal, and most importantly, experiential. All of this defines who we are and gives us if you will our abilities to function as leaders. I believe all of those pieces constitute formal education - it is invaluable to who we are and how well we perform.

Boxing is a formal, ritualized creation of crisis.