Famous quotes containing the words formal and/or systems:
“The formal Washington dinner party has all the spontaneity of a Japanese imperial funeral.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)
“What avails it that you are a Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)