Trigonometry Quotes

• Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Inspirational, Fun, Teenager

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• Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?

  Gustave Flaubert

  Ocean, Math, Boys

  71 Copy quote

• The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Law, Mind, Matter

  James Clerk Maxwell (1990). “The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell: 1846-1862”, p.383, CUP Archive

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• A surprise trigonometry quiz that everyone in class fails? Must be in the Lord’s plan to give us challenges.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Class, Giving, Challenges

  "A Walk to Remember". Book by Nicholas Sparks, www.beliefnet.com. 1999.

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• I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told.

  Pat Conroy

  Lying, Silence, Trying

  Pat Conroy (2010). “South of Broad”, p.47, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• The teachers that we actually learn more from are the ones that taught us life lessons more than trigonometry. And they have such a huge responsibility and they're under-appreciated and underpaid. So that's my opinion of teachers.

  Justin Timberlake

  Teacher, Life Lesson, Responsibility

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• She can tell you the height of the attacker from the trigonometry of the blood spatter, while I'm fuzzy on what trigonometry is.

  Ilona Andrews

  Blood, Height, Fuzzy

  Ilona Andrews (2011). “Magic Slays”, p.46, Penguin

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• Our eyes met in the math class. How were we to know that trigonometry would lead to matrimony?

  Sophie Kinsella

  Eye, Math, Class

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• Pi is not merely the ubiquitous factor in high school geometry problems; it is stitched across the whole tapestry of mathematics, not just geometry's little corner of it. Pi occupies a key place in trigonometry too. It is intimately related to e, and to imaginary numbers. Pi even shows up in the mathematics of probability

  Robert Kanigel

  School, Keys, Numbers

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• Andrew Hacker argues that algebra and trigonometry and calculus are subjects that almost nobody used after they graduate, and so why should we continue to compel students to try to pass them?

  Anya Kamenetz

  Trying, Students, Arguing

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• I'm an artist; I'm not going to use trigonometry.

  Taylor Momsen

  Artist, Use

  "Iron Maiden". Interview with Lauren Waterman, www.teenvogue.com. July 27, 2009.

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• The old woman was not only ugly with the ugliness age brings us all but showed signs of formidable ugliness by birth - pickle-jar chin, mainsail ears and a nose like a trigonometry problem. What's more, she had the deep frown and snit wrinkles that come from a lifetime of bad character.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Sarcastic, Character, Wrinkles

  P.J. O'Rourke (2012). “Holidays in Hell”, p.145, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• A considreable portion of my high school trigonometry course was devoted to the solution of oblique triangles... I have still not had an excuse for using my talents for solving oblique triangles. If a professional mathematician never uses these dull techniques in a highly varied career, why must all high school students devote several weeks to the subject?

  John G. Kemeny

  School, Careers, Technique

  11 Copy quote

• And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives—the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us—that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Beautiful, Hate, Loss

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• The beginning of Christendom, is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the Ascent of the Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the Descent of the Paraclete. That measurement, the measurement of eternity in operation, of the bright cloud and the rushing wind, is, in effect, theology.

  Charles Williams

  Spiritual, Clouds, Wind

  Charles Williams (2016). “The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church”, p.1, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• "The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history." Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself. ... Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer. ... A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Science, Long, History

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• Why?" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you!

  Haruki Murakami

  Girl, I Like You, Crazy

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• The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others.

  William James

  Philosophy, Educational, Order

  "Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals".

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• And last of all we have the secondary forms of crystals bursting in upon us, and sparkling in the rigidity of mathematical necessity and telling us, neither of harmony of design, usefulness or moral significance, nothing but spherical trigonometry and Napier's analogies. It is because we have blindly excluded the lessons of these angular bodies from the domain of human knowledge that we are still in doubt about the great doctrine that the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Law, Design, Doubt

  James Clerk Maxwell (1990). “The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell: 1846-1862”, p.383, CUP Archive

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• ... fain would I turn back the clock and devote to French or some other language the hours I spent upon algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, of which not one principle remains with me. Stay! There is one theorem painfully drummed into my head which seems to have inhabited some corner of my brain since that early time: "The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides!" There it sticks, but what of it, ye gods, what of it?

  Jessie Belle Rittenhouse

  Squares, Two Sides, Brain

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