Formation Quotes

“When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Dust is the parent of a star!”
― Munia Khan

“Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.”
― Georges Cuvier, Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe, Etudes sur L'Ibis et Memoire sur La Venus Hottentote

“The Christian experience is not primarily formed by our liturgy, doctrine, or ecclesiology, as important as those might be. We are formed by the dangerous stories of our great hero.”
― Michael Frost, Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture

“The truth is that our enjoyments and our evaluations, like our trades, are learned; intensive knowledge, as well as extensive, is acquired. We learn how to value possessions as well as how to make them; our passions, our disgusts, and our ambitions are learned. Just as we have evolved ways of transmuting physical elements from one to another, so we have evolved ways of transmuting experience into meaning.”
― Denham Sutcliffe

“Sorgan tried his very best not to think about how long it must have taken for a stream that small to eat its way down through solid rock to form its current bed. Sorgan knew exactly what the word “hundred” meant, but when numbers wandered off toward “thousand”—or even “million”—and the people who used those terms were talking about years, Sorgan’s mind shied back in horror.”
― David Eddings, Crystal Gorge

“Quando se deu conta disso, a tristeza avançou silenciosamente, como água. Era uma tristeza transparente, sem forma. A tristeza era dele mesmo, mas, ao mesmo tempo, se encontrava em algum lugar distante, longe do seu alcance. O peito doeu como se parte dele tivesse sido arrancada, e se sentiu sufocado.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Failure is the path; beauty is the destination. We walk toward beauty on the path of failure. Which is to say that formation occurs at the interplay of failure and beauty.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“The most alarming part of this is not our bad habits, which we tend to know about. It's our collective assimilation, which is invisible to us.
As Annie Dillard says, "How we spend our days is of course, how we spend our lives." - Annie Dillard (p. 15)”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Here is a paper crease,
folded severely by a determined hand.
It is the crossroad that I’ve been told
to keep an eye out for.
I can do this!

Stepping onto the crease,
I tense my body in anticipation of the worst.
I am rising higher now as the crease grows,
forming into a large, dotted green hill.”
― Susan L. Marshall, All the Hope We Carry

“According to Maximus the Confessor in "One Hundred Chapters of Love", the key to directing and increasing one's desire for God is the acquisition of the virtues-which, you'll recall, we described above as noncognitive "dispositions" acquired through practices. So how does one acquire such virtues, such dispositions of desire? Through participation in concrete Christian practices like confession.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“When a child is immersed in a certain environment, his thinking is formed by roles models of behavior demonstrated by parents in the family who have had a great influence on the formation of thinking of the child”
― Sunday Adelaja

“so who knows truly whence it has arisen?
Whence all creation had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows - or maybe even he does not know.”
― Vedas

“As of yet there has been no theory or process for true strategy creation.”
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant

“God is the ultimate Master of all Arts. For He made Creation without any reference to any previous formation.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, Daily Quotes about God: 365 Days of Heavenly Inspiration

“...failure is not the enemy of formation; it is the liturgy of formation.”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“Others have passed faith onto us and we borrow those customs and traditions that help form us. But, sometimes, we also need to adopt new practices that helps us on the journey.”
― Karl Forehand, Apparent Faith: What Fatherhood Taught Me About the Father's Heart

“I wished I could read the personalities of young children more easily, but because the early years were all about formation, true personalities didn't start showing up until nine or ten years of age.”
― Heather Webber, In the Middle of Hickory Lane

“Ordinary habits shape the soul in the most extraordinary ways. (p. 6)”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“This is not just a personal matter. It is a public matter of neighbor love. Talking about Jesus while ignoring the way of Jesus has created an American Christianity that is far more American than it is Christian. (p. 17)”
― Justin Whitmel Earley, The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction

“However, this saving grace can be stunted. We can stop at this point where we will be actually saved; but, we will not be working out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12). The person can live and die only at the stage of being saved and Christ will not be formed in him. If this happens, we will be infants in Christ; we will live a very superficial Christian life and a life that is full of struggles and conflicts. Paul calls it a life according to the flesh and in other places in the Bible it is called the state of spiritual childhood.”
― Atef Meshreky, The Inner Man & the Formation of Christ

“Small particles succeed in uniting, and their ordering is not regulated by smaller or bigger masses because, in the primordial state, there are no bigger or smaller masses. The mover puts everything in motion or creates an illusion of movement. The mover produced enough vibration to cause the formation of quarks, electrons, and possibly “other particles” from the primordial foggy fluid and fire in trillions of degrees.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE