Straight Lines Quotes - Page 6

And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

Milan Kundera

Happiness, Running, Time

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I see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy.

Kelly Miller

Taken, Errors, Justice

Kelly Miller (1914). “Out of the house of bondage”

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Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

R. Buckminster Fuller

School, Knowledge, Suggestions

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To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?

Angela Carter

Men, Two, Giving

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She was all the things I wasn't. And i was all the things she wasn't. she could paint circles around anyone; I couldn't even draw a straight line. She was never into sports; I've always been. Her hand, it fit mine.

Jodi Picoult

Sports, Hands, Circles

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Where everyone else sees a straight line, you see a maze, and when I'm done talking to you, the maze starts to make more sense --Reply by Dove to Aly's silent inquiry

Tamora Pierce

Talking, Mazes, Inquiry

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The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.

Madeleine L'Engle

Love Is, Growth, Valleys

Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage”, p.64, Open Road Media

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Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).

Vladimir Lenin

Independent, Curves, Class

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But actually time isn't a straight line. It doesn't ave a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn't have any form. But since we can't picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution.

Haruki Murakami

Mind, Shapes, Lines

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Things don't just happen, they have reasons. And the reasons have reasons. And the reasons for the reasons have reasons. And then the things that happen make other things happen, so they become reasons themselves. Nothing moves forward in a straight line, nothing is straightforward.

Kevin Brooks

Moving, Lines, Reason

"Martyn Pig".

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Four circles to the kissing come, The smaller are the benter. The bend is just the inverse of The distance from the centre. Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb There's now no need for rule of thumb. Since zero bend's a dead straight line And concave bends have minus sign, The sum of squares of all four bends Is half the square of their sum.

Frederick Soddy

Zero, Distance, Math

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Why is geometry often described as cold and dry? One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline or a tree.

Benoit Mandelbrot

Nature, Lying, Science

"Benoît Mandelbrot obituary' by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, www.theguardian.com. October 17, 2010.

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I don't know many people, if any, who have had some straight line toward success. I mean, they start here, they work hard, they've got what it takes, and they just go straight to the top over some number of years. Most people get a little failure.

Sam Donaldson

Success, Congratulations, Hard Work

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Did you know that there are no straight lines in the universe? Life doesn't travel in perfectly straight lines. It moves more like a winding river. More often than not, you can only see to the next bend, and only when you reach that next turn can you see more.

T. Harv Eker

Life, Moving, Rivers

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The crime which bankrupts men and states is job-work-declining from your main design, to serve a turn here and there. Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life, nothing is great or desirable if it is off from that. I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line and say that society can never prosper but must always be bankrupts, until every man does that which he was created to do.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jobs, Men, Thinking

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.375

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The straight line is ungodly.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Drawing, Lines

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Everything in the universe goes by indirection. There are no straight lines.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Positive, Positivity, Lines

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Linda Allardt (1982). “The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.104, Harvard University Press

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She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.

Ruth Ozeki

New York, Drama, Struggle

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I have got this obsessive compulsive disorder where I have to have everything in a straight line, or everything has to be in pairs.

David Beckham

Inspirational, Obsessive Compulsive, Lines

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The growth of understanding follows an ascending spiral rather than a straight line.

Marion Milner

Time, Learning, Understanding

Marion Milner (2011). “A Life of One's Own”, p.33, Taylor & Francis

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Our success has not been a continual series of victories. We have had a number of devastating setbacks; how these are handled is the making of a great team... winning does not happen in straight lines.

Clive Woodward

Sports, Team, Winning

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...youth is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

Anthony Burgess

Brother, Spring, Animal

Anthony Burgess (2011). “A Clockwork Orange”, p.211, W. W. Norton & Company

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Our knowledge of stars and interstellar matter must be based primarily on the electromagnetic radiation which reaches us. Nature has thoughtfully provided us with a universe in which radiant energy of almost all wave lengths travels in straight lines over enormous distances with usually rather negligible absorption.

Lyman Spitzer

Stars, Distance, Knowledge

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It's not just straight-line speed. He's got the agility and the quickness to go with it. His vision on the field is phenomenal. It just opens the playbook so much as a coach that I'm really looking forward to it.

LeBron James

Vision, Agility, Lines

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Stories move in circle. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the finding is the getting lost. And when you’re lost you start to look around and to listen.

Deena Metzger

Moving, Home, Circles

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