Geometry Quotes

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...”
― Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

“Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.”
― Galileo

“What's your angle?" I asked, trying to sound more playful than demanding.
"Isosceles," Jack quipped.”
― Amanda Hocking, My Blood Approves

“You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“A circle has no end.”
― Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation

“Geometry has two great treasures; one is the Theorem ofPythagoras;the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.”
― Johannes Kepler

“Where is the library?”

“Turn right, proceed thirty-four paces, turn right again, twelve paces, then through door on the right, thirty-five paces, through archway on right another eleven paces, turn right one last time, fifteen paces, enter the door on the right.”

Mappo stared at Iskaral Pust.

The High Priest shifted nervously.

“Or,” the Trell said, eyes narrowed, “turn left, nineteen paces.”

“Aye,” Iskaral muttered.”
― Steven Erikson, Deadhouse Gates

“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, The Glass Bead Game

“I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics...that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.”
― Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics

“Give me a place to stand, a lever long enough and a fulcrum. and I can move the Earth”
― Archimedes

“He could not believe that any of them might actually hit somebody. If one did, what a nowhere way to go: killed by accident; slain not as an individual but by sheer statistical probability, by the calculated chance of searching fire, even as he himself might be at any moment. Mathematics! Mathematics! Algebra! Geometry! When 1st and 3d Squads came diving and tumbling back over the tiny crest, Bell was content to throw himself prone, press his cheek to the earth, shut his eyes, and lie there. God, oh, God! Why am Ihere?Why am Ihere?After a moment's thought, he decided he better change it to: why arewehere. That way, no agency of retribution could exact payment from him for being selfish.”
― James Jones, The Thin Red Line

“Be honest: did you actually read [the above geometric proof]? Of course not. Who would want to?

The effect of such a production being made over something so simple is to make people doubt their own intuition. Calling into question the obvious by insisting that it be 'rigorously proved'... is to say to a student 'Your feelings and ideas are suspect. You need to think and speak our way.”
― Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form

“What music is to the heart, mathematics is to the mind.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“In the various arts, and above all in that of writing, the shortest distance between two points, even if close to each other, has never been and never will be, nor is it now, what is known as a straight line, never, never, to put it strongly and emphatically in response to any doubts, to silence them once and for all.”
― Jose Saramago

“In reality the universe has no geometry.”
― Kedar Joshi, Superultramodern Science And Philosophy

“Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person’s mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated—created from connections that were not there before”
― James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science

“If our sides were unequal our angles might be unequal. Instead of its being sufficient to feel, or estimate by sight, a single angle in order to determine the form of an individual, it would be necessary to ascertain each angle by the experiment of Feeling. But life would be too short for such a tedious groping. The whole science and art of Sight Recognition would at once perish; Feeling, so far as it is an art, would not long survive; intercourse would become perilous or impossible; there would be an end to all confidence, all forethought; no one would be safe in making the most simple social arrangements; in a word, civilization would relapse into barbarism.”
― Edwin Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“In the pentagram, the Pythagoreans found all proportions well-known in antiquity: arithmetic, geometric, harmonic, and also the well-known golden proportion, or the golden ratio.... Probably owing to the perfect form and the wealth of mathematical forms, the pentagram was chosen by the Pythagoreans as their secret symbol and a symbol of health. - Alexander Voloshinov [As quoted in Stakhov]”
― Alexey Stakhov, MATHEMATICS OF HARMONY: FROM EUCLID TO CONTEMPORARY MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

“Life is geometry and chemistry, not biology.”
― Joey Lawsin, Inscription by Design

“a constellation is formed by points of light that are not connected to each other by anything other than the observer”
― Ethan Chatagnier, Singer Distance

“Everybody at the party is a many sided polygon....Nonagon!”
― They Might Be Giants

“To bi željela geometrizirati – sustavnu i promišljenu strukturu teksta.”
― Jasna Horvat, Auron

“Our brains are flies, bats, and worms that clumped together for mutual advantage. These parts of our brains are talking to each other all the time. Translating what they perceive, moment to moment, into the shared language of geometry. That’s what a brain is. That’s what it is to be conscious.”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“The Ark of the Covenant is a Golden Rectangle because its rectangular shape is in the proportions of the Golden Ratio.”
― Donald Frazer, Hieroglyphs and Arithmetic of the Ancient Egyptian Scribes: Version 1

“V geometrickém světě, jehož objev byl umožněn onou pozoruhodnou schopností proniknout skrze čtverec nakreslený v písku ke čtverci geometrickému, nalezla řecká antika místo, v němž se nachází pravda v ničím nezastřené podobě.”
― Petr Vopěnka, Trýznivé tajemství

“How did you know?” he called to Isoke. “What gave them away?”
She wiped her blade on the fabric of her skirt.
“Geometry,” the border girl replied.”
― Tom Durwood, The Adventures of Ruby Pi and the Geometry Girls

“[Euclid's] second postulate, for example, says that any line segment may be extended indefinitely. That is difficult for even the most querulous to argue with. The fifth, on the other hand, states that if two lines are drawn which intersect a third in such a way that the sum of the inner angles on one side (labelled a and b in the diagram below) is less than two right angles (i.e. 180°), then the two lines inevitably must intersect each other on that side if extended far enough. If, on the other hand, a and b do add up to 180°, the two lines never meet so are said to be parallel.
To mathematicians, that looks less like a postulate and more like a theorem in need of proving.”
― Ananyo Bhattacharya, The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann

“They moved closer to the portal. Rising flights of steps, upside-down towers, doors opening to nowhere and anywhere: it was truly the representation of madness. If geometry can be evil, this was it.”
― James Mordechai

“Understanding develops slowly.”
― F. William Lawvere, Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories

“I don’t get the point of this. Where in the real world will I have someone ask me to prove this is a circle? Look, it’s round. It’s a circle. Stop giving it an existential crisis, geometry!”
― Ellen Mint, Mistletoe Latte