Spirals Quotes - Page 3

• Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.

  Seth Lloyd

  Running, People, Stories

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• For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Cutting, Loss

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.28, Faber & Faber

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• Somewhere somebody must have some sense. Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Hate, Cutting, Men

  "Loving Your Enemies". Speech delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, November 17, 1957.

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• Execution halts your breath, helter skelter spiral death.

  Ozzy Osbourne

  Execution, Halt, Breaths

  Song: Bloodbath In Paradise, 1988

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• You can make bad choices and find yourself in a downward spiral or you can find something that gets you out of it.

  Ray LaMontagne

  Choices, Finding Yourself, Downward Spiral

  "Ray LaMontagne: Digging Deep And Doing What He Does" by Ellen Sterling, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 2, 2010.

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• What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Art, Lines, Ascending

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Illustrated)”, p.1029, Delphi Classics

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• Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.

  Hermann Hesse

  Travel, Stupid, Journey

  Hermann Hesse (2015). “Siddhartha: An Indian Tale”, p.73, Om Books International

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• If you ever take your foot off the gas pedal, things will spiral out of control, snowball downwards.

  Sam Altman

  Feet, Pedals, Gas

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• The great spirals, with their enormous radial velocities and insensible proper motions, apparently lie outside our Solar system.

  Edwin Powell Hubble

  Lying, Velocity, Astronomy

  Edwin Powell Hubble (1920). “Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae ...”

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• Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I'm a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch — terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.

  Rube Goldberg

  Believe, Mean, Thinking

  "Rube Goldberg: Inventions!".

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• Time is the continuous loop, the snakeskin with scales endlessly overlapping without beginning or end, or time is an ascending spiral if you will, like a child's toy Slinky.

  Annie Dillard

  Time, Children, Ascending

  Annie Dillard (2011). “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, p.77, Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd

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• When someone is denying what they are, then that's when things start to spiral down.

  will.i.am

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction... I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow... I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Peace, War, Believe

  Martin Luther King, Jr.'s acceptance speech on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1964.

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• William Carlos Williams, late in his long life, had a dream: He saw an enormous spiral staircase in empty space, and his father slowly descending toward him. When he reached the bottom, his father walked over, looked him in the eye and said: “You know those poems you're writing? They're no good.”

  Eliot Weinberger

  Dream, Father, Writing

  Eliot Weinberger (2007). “An Elemental Thing”, p.115, New Directions Publishing

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• This is the mythosphere. It's made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you can see, it's constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite crude and dangerous. They've hardened off, you see.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Believe, Moving, People

  Diana Wynne Jones (2007). “The Game”, Puffin Books

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• The downward spiral of Dumbness in America is about to hit a new low.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  America, Lows, Downward Spiral

  Hunter S. Thompson (2012). “Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness”, p.266, Pan Macmillan

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• That is the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns. Now I think we are small enough.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Science, Thinking, Way

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• In a spiral galaxy, the ratio of dark-to-light matter is about a factor of ten. That's probably a good number for the ratio of our ignorance-to-knowledge. We're out of kindergarten, but only in about third grade.

  Vera Rubin

  Ignorance, Knowledge, Dark

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• I always figured I myself would never be lucky enough to die, I'd just live on and on in this increasingly dreary spiral.

  Jerry Stahl

  Lucky, Enough, Just Live

  "Jerry Stahl Talks Smack". Interview with Royal Young, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 25, 2013.

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• One key factor in the downward spiral in our educational system is that there is too much stroking and too little real feedback.

  Randy Pausch

  Real, Educational, Keys

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• To me it seems not unreasonable to find a re-enforcement of optimism, a renewal of courage and hope, in the modern theory that man has mounted to what he is from the lowest step of potentiality, through toilsome grades of ever-expanding existence, even thought it have been by a spiral stairway, mainly dark or dusty, with loop-holes at long intervals only, and these granting but a narrow and one-sided view.

  James Russell Lowell

  Dark, Men, Views

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• Never worry alone. When anxiety grabs my mind, it is self-perpetuating. Worrisome thoughts reproduce faster than rabbits, so one of the most powerful ways to stop the spiral of worry is simply to disclose my worry to a friend... The simple act of reassurance from another human being [becomes] a tool of the Spirit to cast out fear -- because peace and fear are both contagious.

  John Ortberg

  Peace, Powerful, Fear

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• The only perfect circle on the human body is the eye. When a baby is born it's so perfect, but when it opens its eyes it's just blinded by the corruption and everything else is a downward spiral.

  Richey Edwards

  Baby, Fear, Eye

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• Because we are limited in our knowledge, even the sanest of us are slightly insane. Our limitations are a kind of madness, and we can only choose to deny we are mad, and so descend into a dark spiral of total insanity, or accept we are mad and embark on a quest to regain our true and wholesome sanity

  Dwight Longenecker

  Dark, Mad, Insanity

  Dwight Longenecker (2014). “The Romance of Religion: Fighting for Goodness, Truth, and Beauty”, p.5, Thomas Nelson

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• Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don't let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?

  Don DeLillo

  Light, Talking, Sky

  Don DeLillo (2011). “White Noise”, p.119, Pan Macmillan

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