Spirals Quotes

• Goethe has made a remark upon the perfectability of the human mind, which is full of sagacity: It is always advancing, but in a spiral line.

  Madame de Stael

  Learning, Mind, Progress

  "Germany". Book by Madame de Stael, 1813.

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• The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Circles, Form, Vicious

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1996). “Novels and Memoirs, 1941-1951”, Library of America

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• We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.

  Hermann Hesse

  Yoga, Buddhism, Circles

  Hermann Hesse (2015). “Siddhartha: An Indian Tale”, p.17, Om Books International

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• The whole universe is based on rhythms. Everything happens in circles, in spirals.

  John Hartford

  Circles, Everything Happens For A Reason, Rhythm

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• The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Eye, Ducks

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• The spiral in a snail's shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It's the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world.

  Joseph Gordon-Levitt

  Dna, Culture, Shells

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• Contact with the sacred occurs in the stillness of the heart and mind. If there is any real destination to the spiritual quest, it is this point of silence, the middle of the spiral, the center of the self. ... The only map that does the spiritual traveler any good is one that leads to the center.

  Christina Baldwin

  Spiritual, Real, Heart

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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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• Like a circle in a spiral
  Like a wheel within a wheel
  Never ending or beginning
  On an ever-spinning reel
  As the images unwind
  Like the circles that you find
  In the windmills of your mind.

  Michel Legrand

  Song, Circles, Mind

  Song: The Windmills of Your Mind

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• This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time.

  Frances E. Willard

  Moving, Law, Progress

  Frances E. Willard (2017). “A Wheel within a Wheel - How I learned to Ride the Bicycle with Some Reflections by the Way”, p.18, Read Books Ltd

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• It's about time you admitted that you are a miraculous work of art. You came into this world as a radiant bundle of exuberant riddles. You slipped into this dimension as a shimmering burst of spiral hallelujahs. You blasted into this realm as a lush explosion of ecstatic gratitude. And it is your birthright to fulfill those promises.

  Rob Brezsny

  Gratitude, Art, Promise

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• Energy moves in cycles, circles, spirals, vortexes, whirls, pulsations, waves, and rhythms—rarely if ever in simple straight lines.

  Starhawk

  Moving, Simple, Circles

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• You are one with the same force that provides the spiral arms of the galaxy. That universal creativity. It's also what you are as well. And when the mystic eye is open and sees that, a person is forever changed !

  Alex Grey

  Creativity, Eye, Forever

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• Good action and thoughts produce consequences which tend to neutralize, or put a stop to, the result of evil thoughts and actions. For as we give up the life of self (and note that, like forgiveness, repentance and humility are also special cases of giving), as we abandon what the German mystics called "the I, me, mine," we make ourselves progressively capable of receiving grace. By grace we are enabled to know reality more completely, and this knowledge of reality helps us to give up more of the life of selfhood - and so on, in a mounting spiral of illumination and regeneration.

  Aldous Huxley

  Giving Up, Humility, Reality

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• Modern humans became fixated on a collective hallucination of linear time, ignoring the fractal spirals of the surrounding universe.

  Daniel Pinchbeck

  Hallucinations, Modern, Linear

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• The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.

  Elif Safak

  Moving, Mean, Past

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• Pick up a sunflower and count the florets running into its centre, or count the spiral scales of a pine cone or a pineapple, running from its bottom up its sides to the top, and you will find an extraordinary truth: recurring numbers, ratios and proportions.

  Charles Jencks

  Running, Numbers, Sunflower

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• His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.

  Hermann Hesse

  Taken, Circles, Full Circle

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• When you’re stuck in a spiral, to change all aspects of the spin you need only to change one thing.

  Christina Baldwin

  Needs, Aspect, Stuck

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• Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping.

  Julia Margaret Cameron

  Business, Organization, Growth

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• Tricky the paths a long love might follow, like the spiral down twists of a raindrop on a windowpane.

  Kevin Barry

  Long, Raindrops, Might

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• The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Peace, Kings, Hatred

  "Where do we go from here: Chaos or community?". Book by Martin Luther King Jr., 1967.

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• Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series

  Stuart Kauffman

  Numbers, Eight, Pairs

  Stuart Kauffman (1996). “At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity”, p.151, Oxford University Press

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• At Girl Scouts, we are committed to raising awareness about the terrible effects of cyber bullying, and to teaching girls how to recognize the signs of bullying of any sort and extricate themselves or another from a bad situation before it spirals out of control and ends in tragedy.

  Anna Maria Chavez

  Girl, Bullying, Teaching

  "Confronting Cyber Violence in the Digital Age" by Anna Maria Chavez, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 25, 2013.

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• We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.

  Ezra Pound

  Time, Past, Here And There

  Ezra Pound (1980). “Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts”, p.253, New Directions Publishing

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