They thought in terms of: whatever you had that started you at the box office, this was it.
Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory - to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.
One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.
Even before Melanchthon sank into his grave, he was dismayed at seeing Lutheranism stiffen into dogmas and formulas, and heartbroken by a persecution from his fellow-Protestants more bitter than anything he had ever experienced from Catholics.
To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.
..., twice two is four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death.
So, I think there's a danger that good stuff can fall by the wayside if it doesn't conform to formula. But I think it comes down to money and they just don't know where it's going if they haven't got any precedent.
One has to guard against a formula that is good for everything, that can interpret reality in addition to the other arts, and that rather than creating can only result in a style, or a stylization.
I believe that no one who is familiar, either with mathematical advances in other fields, or with the range of special biological conditions to be considered, would ever conceive that everything could be summed up in a single mathematical formula, however complex.
What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
I'd rather make my own mistakes and pay for them rather than pay for mistakes that are formulistic.
Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.
One of my biggest sources of angst is having people so comfortable with a formula that works that they are not challenging themselves or their ideas.
I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs and human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom.
It is now almost my sole rule of life to clear myself of cants and formulas, as of poisonous Nessus shirts.
There are many virtues in books, but the essential value is the adding of knowledge to our stock by the record of new facts, and, better, by the record of intuitions which distribute facts, and are the formulas which supersede all histories.
