Horizontal Lines Quotes

• Hence no force, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line which is accurately straight: there will always be a bending downwards.

  William Whewell

  Bending, Lines, Force

  Elementary Treatise on Mechanics ch. 4 (1819). This is an instance of unintentional rhyme and meter. After the passage's poetical qualities were pointed out to him,Whewell altered it in subsequent editions of the book.

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• Vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; they exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes 'life'. I recognized that the equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites.

  Piet Mondrian

  Expression, Opposites, Two

  Piet Mondrian, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Washington Gallery of Modern Art (Washington, D.C.) (1965). “Piet Mondrian, 1872-1944: exhibition Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Washington Gallery of Modern Art”

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• I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.

  Donald Barthelme

  Art, Thinking, Progress

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• But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper…I…I…I…I…I…I.

  Sylvia Plath

  Thinking, Two, Special

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.34, Anchor

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• Life isn't some vertical or horizontal line -- you have your own interior world, and it's not neat.

  Patti Smith

  World, Lines, Neat

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• A vertical line is dignity. The horizontal line is peaceful. The obtuse angle is action. That's universal, it is primary.

  Janet Collins

  Peaceful, Lines, Action

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• My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that.

  Richard Powers

  Dream, Lying, Writing

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• My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines. There's not any hint of nature. And still everybody responds, I think.

  Agnes Martin

  Art, Thinking, Hints

  "Perfection Is in the Mind". Interview with Joan Simon, August 21, 1995.

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• We live in an age where quantity is seen as preferable to quality, and many people tend to work in a horizontal line: next, next, next. But if you do that, you never investigate the vertical line - the depth of the piece.

  Simon McBurney

  Inspirational, Work, People

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• I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress.

  Donald Barthelme

  Art, Thinking, Progress

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• It is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.

  Piet Mondrian

  Art, Strong, Curves

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• My affection for CinemaScope initially was my affection for the horizontal line as I learned it from having been apprenticed to an architect who was someone named Frank Lloyd Wright.

  Nicholas Ray

  Lines, Affection, Architect

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• When the elements are arranged in vertical columns according to increasing atomic weight, so that the horizontal lines contain analogous elements again according to increasing atomic weight, an arrangement results from which several general conclusions may be drawn.

  Dmitri Mendeleev

  Science, Elements, Weight

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• I have gained very great inspiration from the Cornish land- and seascape, the horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour which reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excites one's sense of form; and first and last there is the human figure which in the country becomes a free and moving part of a greater whole. This relationship between figure and landscape is vitally important to me. I cannot feel it in a city.

  Barbara Hepworth

  Country, Moving, Inspiration

  "Voicing Our Visions: Writings by Women Artists". Book by Mara R. Witzling, 1991.

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• Once, I'd written a Western story, and one of the panels was just a hand holding a six-shooter, and there was a puff of smoke coming out of the barrel, and a straight horizontal line, indicating the trajectory of the bullet. So that page was sent back to me from the Code office, saying that the particular panel was too violent. I asked them what they meant, and they told me--I swear--"The puff of smoke is too big." Well, of course. So I had the artist make the smoke a little smaller, and the youth of America was saved.

  Stan Lee

  Artist, America, Hands

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