Geometry Quotes - Page 5

• The circle is the fundamental geometry of open human communication.

  Harrison Owen

  Communication, Circles, Fundamentals

  Harrison Owen (2009). “Open Space Technology: A User's Guide: Easy Read Comfort Edition”, p.7, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• I need geometry to set the grammar of the image expressive language . The structural skeleton, the composition and the geometric layout provide a perspective from which one can read the image; otherwise we would do what Dadaists did when they put words in a little bag and then took them out at random in order to compose a poem.

  Augusto De Luca

  Skeletons, Order, Perspective

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• The truth us that other systems of geometry are possible, yet after all, these other systems are not spaces but other methods of space measurements. There is one space only, though we may conceive of many different manifolds, which are contrivances or ideal constructions invented for the purpose of determining space.

  Paul Carus

  Truth, Science, Space

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• Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

  Henry James

  Artist, Circles, Problem

  'Roderick Hudson' (1877) preface

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• This king [Sesostris] divided the land among all Egyptians so as to give each one a quadrangle of equal size and to draw from each his revenues, by imposing a tax to be levied yearly. But everyone from whose part the river tore anything away, had to go to him to notify what had happened; he then sent overseers who had to measure out how much the land had become smaller, in order that the owner might pay on what was left, in proportion to the entire tax imposed. In this way, it appears to me, geometry originated, which passed thence to Hellas.

  Herodotus

  Kings, Science, Egypt

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• Scientists say every action initiates an equal and opposite reaction. I say that's just the start. I say every action initiates a most unequal and upredictable chain reaction, that every filament of living becomes part of a larger weave, while remaining identifiable. That every line of latitude requires several stripes of longitude to obtain meaning. That every universe is part of a bigger heaven, a heaven of rhythm and geometry, where a heartbeat is the apex of a triangle.

  Ellen Hopkins

  Opposites, Heaven, Stripes

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• Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer.

  Guillaume Apollinaire

  Art, Order, Plastic

  Guillaume Apollinaire, Dorothea Eimert (2014). “Cubism”, p.12, Parkstone International

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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

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• There are no sects in geometry.

  Voltaire

  Math, Sects, Mathematics

  Francois Voltaire (1977). “The Portable Voltaire”, p.131, Penguin

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• The first test of potential in mathematics is whether you can get anything out of geometry.

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Tests, Firsts, Mathematics

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• Since geometry is co-eternal with the divine mind before the birth of things, God himself served as his own model in creating the world (for what is there in God which is not God?), and he with his own image reached down to humanity.

  Johannes Kepler

  Creating, Humanity, Mind

  "Kepler, Four Hundred Years" edited by Arthur and Peter Beer, 1975.

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• We admit, in geometry, not only infinite magnitudes, that is to say, magnitudes greater than any assignable magnitude, but infinite magnitudes infinitely greater, the one than the other. This astonishes our dimension of brains, which is only about six inches long, five broad, and six in depth, in the largest heads.

  Voltaire

  Long, Brain, Ontology

  Voltaire (2016). “Voltaire – The Philosophical Works: Treatise On Tolerance, Philosophical Dictionary, Candide, Letters on England, Plato’s Dream, Dialogues, The Study of Nature, Ancient Faith and Fable, Zadig…: From the French writer, historian and philosopher, famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion and freedom of expression”, p.1207, e-artnow

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• The object of geometry in all its measuring and computing, is to ascertain with exactness the plan of the great Geometer, to penetrate the veil of material forms, and disclose the thoughts which lie beneath them? When our researches are successful, and when a generous and heaven-eyed inspiration has elevated us above humanity, and raised us triumphantly into the very presence, as it were, of the divine intellect, how instantly and entirely are human pride and vanity repressed, and, by a single glance at the glories of the infinite mind, are we humbled to the dust.

  Benjamin Peirce

  Lying, Inspiration, Science

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• Gravity is a response to geometry.

  Albert Einstein

  Gravity, Response

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• In the physical world, one cannot increase the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality. Similar figures exist only in pure geometry.

  Paul Valery

  Math, Quality, World

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• And therefore in geometry (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind), men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call definitions, and place them in the beginning of their reckoning.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Science, Men, Definitions

  Thomas Hobbes (1750). “The Moral and Political Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury: Never Before Collected Together : To which is Prefixed, the Author's Life, Extracted from that Said to be Written by Himself, ...”, p.109

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• Geometry in every proposition speaks a language which experience never dares to utter; and indeed of which she but halfway comprehends the meaning.

  William Whewell

  Language, Speak, Dare

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• One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.

  Isaac Asimov

  Real, Math, Understanding

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• The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic.

  Lorenzo Ghiberti

  Art, Philosophy, Medicine

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• He who would prove all life, leaves it empty. To know the way of everything is to be left with the geometry of things and with the substance of nothing. To reduce the world to an equation is to leave it without head or feet.

  Leopoldo Alas

  Life, Feet, Substance

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• In terms of the game theory, we might say the universe is so constituted as to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly and steadily toward a certain conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. Similarly, the geometry of life is designed to keep us at the point of maximum tension between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos. Every important call is a close one. We survive and evolve by the skin of our teeth. We really wouldn't want it any other way.

  George Leonard

  Life, Adversity, Order

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• Best Witchcraft is Geometry
  To the magician's mind -
  His ordinary acts are feats
  To thinking of mankind.

  Emily Dickinson

  Life, Thinking, Mind

  Emily Dickinson, Ralph William Franklin (1998). “The Poems of Emily Dickinson”, p.1006, Harvard University Press

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• Only a fraction of the camera's possibilities interests me - the marvelous mixture of emotion and geometry, together in a single instant.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson

  Photography, Together, Cameras

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• Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry.

  Alexander Pushkin

  Inspirational, Math, Poetry

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• A fine image is geometry, modulated by the heart

  Willy Ronis

  Heart, Fine

  Willy Ronis, Sylvia Böhmer, Matthias Harder, Nathalie Neumann (2004). “Willy Ronis: "La vie en passant"”, Prestel Publishing

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