Formlessness Quotes

For at this point one would arrive at the act of thinking of it (evil, i.e. κακως) as if to be disproportion in regards to proportion, and limitlessness in regards to limit, formlessness in regards to the one-shaping-the-forms, always wanting in self-sufficiency, always indefinite, no where having a place to situate itself, wholly passive, insatiable absolute poverty; and these things above have not been corresponding to it, but as if the true essential being of it is these things, and what is it but all these things. ~ Plotinus

My time is limited. It is thence that one fine day, when all nature smiles and shines, the rack lets loose its black unforgettable cohorts and sweeps away the blue for ever. My situation is truly delicate. What fine things, what momentous things, i am going to miss through fear, fear of falling back into the old error, fear of not finishing in time, fear of revelling, for the last time, in a last outpouring of misery, impotence and hate. The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness. ~ Samuel Beckett

One day the play ends and the screen goes blank. There is nothing. Everything returns to its original formlessness - and then another dream begins. ~ Frederick Lenz

Always know the shape you take - know it so well you can shift it to your purpose, so well the form gives way to formlessness again. What is a grain but a seed? And from a seed, you can grow anything. Like, say, a family. ~ Max Gladstone

Painting done under pressure by artists without the necessary talent can only give rise to formlessness, as painting is a profession that requires peace of mind. ~ Titian

There's a series of sculptures there by Michelangelo that you should see. They are called The Captives. Out of a great formless mass of stone, the figures of slaves emerge: heads, shoulders, torsos, straining toward freedom but still held fast in the stone. There are souls like that, Reyes. There are souls that try to carve themselves from their own formlessness. ~ Mary Doria Russell

Nexus
I wrote stubbornly into the evening.
At the window, a giant praying mantis
rubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,
begging vacantly with pale eyes;
and the commas leapt at me like worms
or miniature scythes blackened with age.
the praying mantis screeched louder,
his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.
I walked outside;
the grass hissed at my heels.
Up ahead in the lapping darkness
he wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,
a brontosaurus, a poet. ~ Rita Dove

Be like vapor. Do not give your opponents anything solid to attack; watch as they exhaust themselves pursuing you, trying to cope with your elusiveness. Only formlessness allows you to truly surprise your enemies - by the time they figure out where you are and what you are up to, it is too late. ~ Robert Greene

When the power of the shift rips the human body apart and transforms it into its new shape, there lives a second, less than a second, a mere shimmer of time when the mind is without a home, no body to call its own. Existence is painless in there, nothing but formlessness beyond understanding. A secret place, it contains nothing but the essence of self, a lost self. In the fire of pain, Colton found a whisper of that place, its ghost, its echo, and from that echo he withdrew a thread of deepest black. ~ Finn Marlowe

Those of my critics who declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the meandering formlessness of these notes. ~ Sherwood Anderson

The proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly, and given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms. ~ Plotinus

Music is a form that tends to give shape to rules, social mores, social attitudes, feelings - it does this in a very beautiful, fluid way. To me the issue of form and formlessness is most strong in the theme of mortality versus a human wish for immortality of a sort. Take, for example, the definition of beauty in fashion. Remember what Alison says at the beginning? She says when she was young she didn't know what beautiful was. She looked at this woman who everyone was saying was beautiful and she didn't even know what they were talking about. I experienced that when I was a child. If I loved someone I thought they were really beautiful. And then eventually, I began to get it, the social concept of beauty. Not that I think beautiful is completely imaginary, but beauty is so wide ranging and fluid. Yet there's a need to say: "This is what it is, and it's not changing; we're taking a picture of it to hold it still." It's like an impulse to put up a building meant to last forever. An urge to grab and hold something in place when nothing human can be grabbed and held in place. We come into these physical bodies . . . whatever we are takes this shape that is so particular and distinct - eyes, nose, mouth - and then it gradually begins to disintegrate. Eventually it's going to dissolve completely. It's a huge problem for people; we can understand it, but it breaks our hearts. And so we're constantly trying to pin something down or leave a trace that will last forever. "And this is ~ Mary Gaitskill

Love has its own independent form and formlessness. When someone loves you be gratiful for it. If they stop loving be grateful for that. If they love another, let them love! ~ Frederick Lenz

Quantum attention function is like a virtual mirror which brings time in timelessness, states in statelessness, forms in formlessness and locality in non-locality. ~ Amit Ray

It crumbled apart into ash, going from form to formlessness. To everything, it's season. The pine cone grew into being, burned bright, and now it had disappeared. That was natural. ~ Katherine Howe

Every session attended by the analyst must have no history and no future. What is 'known' about the patient is of no further consequence: it is either false or irrelevant. If it is 'known' by patient and analyst, it is obsolete ... The only point of importance in any session is the unknown. Nothing must be allowed to distract from intuiting that. In any session, evolution takes place. Out of the darkness and formlessness something evolves. ~ Wilfred Bion

One who transmuted things from formlessness and shapelessness into that-which-was-not-real, but without which the real would have no meaning ~ Neil Gaiman

Not every painter has a gift for painting, in fact, many painters are disappointed when they meet with difficulties in art. Painting done under pressure by artists without the necessary talent can only give rise to formlessness, as painting is a profession that requires peace of mind. The painter must always seek the essence of things, always represent the essential characteristics and emotions of the person he is painting ... ~ Titian

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart. ~ Ralph Ellison

What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language. ~ Michael Ondaatje

In order to compensate for its chaotic formlessness, a mass always produces a "Leader," who almost infallibly becomes the victim of his own inflated ego-consciousness, as numerous examples in history show. ~ C.G. Jung

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life ~ Martin Amis

Om-nipotent, Om-nipresent, Om-niscient, Om
all is wholly undivided, instructed the physicist, David Bohm
the enfolded and unfolded, that of formlessness and form
from the implicate unmanifest to the explicate manifest born
originating from an underlying nonphysical order
emerges physical reality with its illusory borders
the whole of existence exists in every wee part
all is here now - the cosmos' stern, bow, starboard and port
the invisible portion of existence is pure potentiality
awareness itself as a field of infinite possibility
physical reality a holographic illusion
science says so - that's its conclusion
the new science is within and is up to you
a simple experiment with loving prayer will do
following science honestly, one is led inward too
with zero biases, mind and reality are seen as not-two
who cares what proofs others are uttering
live it yourself or you know nothing
make a cloud square shape in a oneness experiment
repeat "thank you square cloud" with joyous, grateful intent
the results of this being easily duplicatable
shows that a unitive conscious universe is no fable
Native Americans have their time-tested rain dance
a prayer to the Great Spirit resulting in watered plants ~ Jarett Sabirsh

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise. ~ Jeanette Winterson

God is a weakling. He's quite scared of you. Far weaker than air and water, formless. Be so non violent, you won't hurt a fly, then only he appears.
God is a weakling.

Don't scare away god, not even unintentionally!
It's quite a funny law In God's kingdom, meekness is strength. This space formed from formlessness, Guess how strong it/he must be.
But in man's Kingdom, God is a weakling.

You feel bad if an infant is scared of you, No ?
Far weaker than an infant. When it comes to tender things, how careful you must be, realized ?

God is a weakling!

#SarojNotes #SarojPoetry ~ Saroj Aryal

When the spirit is understood, then life becomes not at all common, but a constant magical circus in which you see yourself reflected in all forms and all formlessness. ~ Frederick Lenz

All that is limited by form, semblance, sound, color is called object. Among them all, man alone is more than an object. Though, like objects, he has form and semblance, He is not limited to form. He is more. He can attain to formlessness. When he is beyond form and semblance, beyond "this" and "that," where is the comparison with another object? Where is the conflict? What can stand in his way? He will rest in his eternal place which is no-place. He will be hidden in his own unfathomable secret. His nature sinks to its root in the One. His vitality, his power hide in secret Tao. ~ Zhuangzi

Ink was black, in inkwells and bottles, in the past. It would get all over your fingers because it would run and flow relentlessly. This inevitable messiness was the flip side of writing. I always felt caught between two kinds of black: that of the dirty and dirtying substance and that of the signs that miraculously emerged from it through the magic of wayward fountain pens, which, when dipped too deep in the inkwell, had a strong tendency to cover the paper with what used to be called "inkblots." Oh, the miracle of a clear and possibly elegant sentence emerging from the sticky ink and wending its way between the blots! It is the black of meaning wrung from the black of matter. (…) Isn't the most profound education the one that was afforded me at my childhood elementary school, the one that divides the ink sharply between thought become Letter and drive turned into splotches and blots? How will those who begin with the darkish gray on the palish gray of computer screens manage? Without the slightest inkblot? Won't they think that thought is just another variation of formlessness, that the intellect is just a thin additional coat of gray over the gray of drive, and drive a mere stripping of the gray of the intellect? Everything in the world is the result of a creative and careful dosing of black as it is projected onto the formidable invariability of white. Anyone who hasn't experienced this, and sooner rather than later, will never learn anything. ~ Alain Badiou

Learn to move fast and adapt or you will be eaten. The best way to avoid this fate is to assume formlessness. No predator alive can attack what it cannot see. OBSERVANCE ~ Robert Greene

Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby, you can be the director of the opponent's fate. ~ Christopher Moore

To change formlessness to form requires massive discrimination. ~ John Zande

Our larger body is eternity. Eventually, we return to the source in its undifferentiated form, in its absolute form, which is both form and formlessness, but we exist in that sea all the time. ~ Frederick Lenz

People don't mind immoral messages. They don't mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex's sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they can't stand is to be told it all doesn't matter, they can't stand formlessness. ~ Doris Lessing