Circle And Circumference Quotes & Sayings

The Hindu believes that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body, and that death means the change of this centre from body to body. — Swami Vivekananda

Individuality in universality is the plan of creation. Each cell has its part in bringing about consciousness. Man is individual and at the same time universal. It is while realising our individual nature that we realise even our national and universal nature. Each is an infinite circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere. By practice one can feel universal Selfhood which is the essence of Hinduism. He who sees in every being his own Self is a Pandita (sage). — Swami Vivekananda

And in between the two, in between the sky and the sea, were all the winds. And there were all the nights and all the moons. To be a castaway is to be a point perpetually at the centre of a circle. However much things may appear to change - the sea may shift from whisper to rage, the sky might go from fresh blue to blinding white to darkest black - the geometry never changes. Your gaze is always a radius. The circumference is ever great. In fact, the circles multiply. To be a castaway is to be caught in a harrowing ballet of circles. — Yann Martel

Old Euclid drew a circle
On a sand-beach long ago.
He bounded and enclosed it
With angles thus and so.
His set of solemn greybeards
Nodded and argued much
Of arc and circumference,
Diameter and such.
A silent child stood by them
From morning until noon
Because they drew such charming
Round pictures of the moon. — Vachel Lindsay

Imagine a large circle and in the center of it rays of light that spread out to the circumference. The light in the center is God; each of us is a ray. The closer the rays are to the center, the closer the rays are to one another. The closer we live to God, the closer we are bound to our neighbor; the farther we are from God, the farther we are from one another. The more each ray departs from its center, the weaker it becomes; and the closer it gets to the center, the stronger it becomes. — Fulton J. Sheen

Let us begin with some of the earliest discoveries and correct hypotheses. Anaximander thought that the earth floats freely, and is not supported on anything. Aristotle,2 who often rejected the best hypotheses of his time, objected to the theory of Anaximander, that the earth, being at the centre, remained immovable because there was no reason for moving in one direction rather than another. If this were valid, he said, a man placed at the centre of a circle with food at various points of the circumference would starve to death for lack of reason to choose one portion of food rather than another. This argument reappears in scholastic philosophy, not in connection with astronomy, but with free will. It reappears in the form of 'Buridan's ass', which was unable to choose between two bundles of hay placed at equal distances to right and left, and therefore died of hunger. — Anonymous

On January 18, 1897, Indiana state representative Taylor I. Record argued in favor of changing the value of pi. Pi, which can be rounded to 3.14159, is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Tyler believed that the number was inconveniently long; in House Bill 246, he asked that it be rounded up to 3.2. The bill passed the House but was defeated in the Senate when the chairman of Purdue University's math department successfully pleaded that it would make Indiana a national laughingstock. The value of pi in Indiana remains the same as in every other state. — Paul A. Offit

God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. — Empedocles

The circle of life is cut up into segments. All lines are equal if they are drawn from the centre and touch the circumference. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

During the few minutes that Lewis was away, Morse was acutely conscious of the truth of the proposition that the wider the circle of knowledge the greater the circumference of ignorance. — Colin Dexter

It never ceases to amaze me how adaptable social geometry can be. Within a couple of days I went from being the centre of the circle to an indefinite point outside its circumference. — K.J. Parker

( ... )"He said we all have this different idea of what love is and that's what makes our circle. The more ideas and misconceptions you throw in, the larger the diameter and the harder it is to connect with someone. We," he said, squeezing Hunter's hand and signaling Margie and everyone around them, "all sit around the edge looking at everyone else around the circle. Sometimes we just settle for the person next to us because it's easy or convenient and we skip our way around its circumference, never really knowing what love is all about."
He took a sip of his Coke and kept his eyes on Margie. "But other times, you see that person across from you, staring back at you, and you fight like hell trying to get across while he does the same. If you're lucky, there's a rope you can toss over and help draw each other in, never looking away, never worrying about those still on the circumference; just you and him, pulling each other in, deeper and deeper." — Brandon Shire

The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity - not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle's diameter into its circumference. — Richard Preston

A holy moonlit night turned into day, when the Sun appeared from the bosom of the Light - the Most High. The Sun became the Son of God. It stood as the Master in the center of its own system, radiating energy in all directions, towards and throughout the circumference. In that circle, the planets - disciples of the Sun - followed an order of strict consistency. They breathed in its heat, and looped around it in an act of worship. — Karim El Koussa

I have often said that a person who wishes to begin a good life should be like one who draws a circle. Let him or her get the center in the right place and keep it so and the circumference will be good. — Meister Eckhart

De Morgan was explaining to an actuary what was the chance that a certain proportion of some group of people would at the end of a given time be alive; and quoted the actuarial formula, involving p [pi], which, in answer to a question, he explained stood for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. His acquaintance, who had so far listened to the explanation with interest, interrupted him and exclaimed, 'My dear friend, that must be a delusion, what can a circle have to do with the number of people alive at a given time?' — W. W. Rouse Ball

A circle is the only geometric shape defined by its centre. No chicken and egg about it, the centre came first, the circumference follows. The earth, by definition, has a centre. And only the fool that knows it can go wherever he pleases, knowing the centre will hold him down, stop him flying out of orbit. But when your sense of centre shifts, comes whizzing to the surface, the balance has gone. The balance has gone. The balance my baby has gone. — Sarah Kane

But you will never realize that an incident which filled but a degree in the circle of your thoughts covered the whole circumference of mine. No person can see exactly what and where another's horizon is. — Thomas Hardy

In 1746 a French scientist, Jean-Antoine Nollet, was interested in how fast electricity could be transmitted. Nollet, a monk, persuaded nearly two hundred other monks to form a circle nearly a kilometer in circumference. The monks were connected by pieces of iron. This metal-and-human chain was connected to a primitive battery (consisting of Leyden jars). When the battery was discharged, every monk was shocked at almost the same time. Clearly electricity traveled very fast. This experiment helped pave the way for others to explore ways electric currents might be useful for communication. — Ronald T. Merrill

As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it. — Albert Einstein

I've been coming to this circle for about five years, and measuring
it. The diameter and the circumference are constantly changing, but
the radius stays the same. Which brings me to the number 5. There are
five letters in the word Blaine. Now, if you mix up the letters in the
word Blaine, mix 'em around, eventually, you'll come up with Nebali.
Nebali. The name of a planet in a galaxy way, way, way... way far
away. And another thing. Once you go into that circle, the weather
never changes. It is always 67 degrees with a 40% chance of rain. — David Cross

Different subjects required different sitting arrangements, Azur explained. For politics, scattered and amorphous; for sociology, a neat triangle; for statistics, a rectangle; and for international relations, a parallelogram. But God has to be discussed in a circle, everyone on the circumference equidistant from the center, looking at one another's eyes. — Elif Shafak

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere. — Empedocles

Unity of opinion is indeed a glorious and desirable thing, and its circle cannot be too strong and extended, if the centre be truth; but if the centre be error, the greater the circumference, the greater the evil. — Charles Caleb Colton

Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in her full and grand majesty, and turn his vision from the low objects which surround him. Let him gaze on that brilliant light, set like an eternal lamp to illumine the universe; let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their revolution round the firmament. But if our view be arrested there, let our imagination pass beyond; it will sooner exhaust the power of conception than nature that of supplying material for conception. The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. It is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In short it is the greatest sensible mark of the almighty power of God, that imagination loses itself in that thought. — Blaise Pascal

The attempt to apply rational arithmetic to a problem in geometry resulted in the first crisis in the history of mathematics. The two relatively simple problems
the determination of the diagonal of a square and that of the circumference of a circle
revealed the existence of new mathematical beings for which no place could be found within the rational domain. — David Van Dantzig