Quotes & Sayings About Circumference

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

We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism. — Laura Riding

She praised his book and he embraced her from gratitude rather than lust, but she didn't let go. Neither did he. She kissed his cheek, his earlobe. For months they'd run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric. The circumference of the world tightened to what their arms encompassed. She sat on the desk, between the columns of read and unread manuscript, and pulled him toward her by his index fingers. — Anthony Marra

We naturally believe we are more capable of reaching the centre of things than of embracing their circumference, and the visible extent of the world is visibly greater than we. But since we in our turn are greater than small things, we think we are more capable of mastering them, and yet it takes no less capacity to reach nothingness than the whole. In either case it takes an infinite capacity, and it seems to me that anyone who had understood the ultimate principles of things might also succeed in knowing infinity. One depends on the other, and one leads to the other. These extremes touch and join by going in opposite directions, and they meet in God and God alone. — Blaise Pascal

My words like eyes that flinch from light, refuse And shut upon obscurity; my acts Cast to their opposites by impatient violence Break up the sequent path; they fly On a circumference to avoid the centre. — Stephen Spender

The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply. Just as in the ceremony the magician first of all marked out the limits of the area where the sacred powers were to come into play, so every work of art describes its own circumference which closes it off from actuality. — Theodor W. Adorno

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

Eratosthenes's only tools were sticks, eyes, feet, and brains; plus a zest for experiment. With those tools he correctly deduced the circumference of the Earth, to high precision, with an error of only a few percent. That's pretty good figuring for 2200 years ago. — Carl Sagan

A small number of temples was protected by the fears, the venality, the taste, or the prudence of the civil and ecclesiastical governors. The temple of the Celestial Venus at Carthage, whose sacred precincts formed a circumference of two miles, was judiciously converted into a Christian church; and a similar consecration has preserved inviolate the majestic dome of the Pantheon at Rome. — Edward Gibbon

The Age of Intellect is accompanied by surprising advances in natural science. In the ninth century, for example, in the age of Mamun, the Arabs measured the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy. Seven centuries were to pass before Western Europe discovered that the world was not flat. Less than fifty years after the amazing scientific discoveries under Mamun, the Arab Empire collapsed. Wonderful and beneficent as was the progress of science, it did not save the empire from chaos. — John Bagot Glubb

Its circumference was tiny, but he had a life, and he would not give it up. — Robin Sloan

The world can no more have two summits than a circumference can have two centres. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The world was here before you,
and will exist after you.
You are not the center of the universe,
nor are you its circumference. — Matshona Dhliwayo

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

Hard-nosed physicists say that the six knobs were never free to vary in the first place. When we finally reach the long-hoped-for Theory of Everything, we shall see that the six key numbers depend upon each other, or on something else as yet unknown, in ways that we today cannot imagine. The six numbers may turn out to be no freer to vary than is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It will turn out that there is only one way for a universe to be. — Richard Dawkins

The iron arc of the avoiding journey Curves back upon my weakness at the end; Whether the faint light spark against my face Or in the dark my sight hide from my sight, Centre and circumference are both my weakness. — Stephen Spender

Whatever may be his [man's] true and final destination, there is a spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution (change and extinction). This is the character of all life and being - each is at once the centre and the circumference; the point to which all things are contained. - On Life — Percy Bysshe Shelley

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

The self is not only the centre but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness. — Carl Jung

Harley studied his erection, lightly running her fingers over the smooth skin. His cock jumped at her touch. It was a pretty penis, she had to say. Good length, pleasing circumference. Not too big, not too small ... the Goldilocks of cocks. Just right. — Erin McCarthy

Sometimes, when I've been staring too hard, I've noticed that I could see the circumference of my own eye. — Lucian Freud

It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry. — Stacy Schiff

The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information- ... That is closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so - which amounts to the same thing. The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end. — Paul Auster

Every man is the center of a circle, whose fatal circumference he can not pass. — John James Ingalls

What is at the higher levels of meaning consciousness is like a hyperspace in which each point is equidistant from the other and where 'the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere'? The mythologies of the occult seem like baroque music: there is an overall similar quality of sound and movement, but, upon examination, each piece of music is unique; Vivaldi and Scarlatti are similar and different. — William Irwin Thompson

The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality! — Herman Melville

His mind of man, a secret makes I meet him with a start he carries a circumference in which I have no part. — Emily Dickinson

The 31th of May, I perceived in the same water more of those Animals, as also some that were somewhat bigger. And I imagine, that [ten hundred thousand] of these little Creatures do not equal an ordinary grain of Sand in bigness: And comparing them with a Cheese-mite (which may be seen to move with the naked eye) I make the proportion of one of these small Water-creatures to a Cheese-mite, to be like that of a Bee to a Horse: For, the circumference of one of these little Animals in water, is not so big as the thickness of a hair in a Cheese-mite. — Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek

There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preexist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world. "Material — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Happy!" He leaned over the rail and tried to hold her eyes. But that is hard to do, for eyes are born dodgers and know a whole circumference of ways out of a bad spot.

"Faith in the Afternoon — Grace Paley

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

Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. — William Blake

To call the place an anthill would be like calling the Versailles Palace a single-family home. Earthen ramparts rose almost to the tops of the surrounding trees
a hundred feet at least. The circumference could have accommodated a Roman hippodrome. A steady stream of soldiers and drones swarmed in and out of the mound. Some carried fallen trees. One, inexplicably, was dragging a 1967 Chevy Impala. — Rick Riordan

An onion-breathed technician in a lab coat measures the distance between Werner's temples, the circumference of his head, and the thickness and shape of his lips. Calipers are used to evaluate his feet, the length of his fingers, and the distance between his eyes and his navel. They measure his penis. The angle of his nose is quantified with a wooden protractor. — Anthony Doerr

I have always believed that I need a circumference of silence. As to what happens to when I composer, I really haven't the faintest idea. — Samuel Barber

For the observed difference in the shadow lengths, the distance between Alexandria and Syene had to be about seven degrees along the surface of the Earth; that is, if you imagine the sticks extending down to the center of the Earth, they would there intersect at an angle of seven degrees. Seven degrees is something like one-fiftieth of three hundred and sixty degrees, the full circumference of the Earth. Eratosthenes knew that the distance between Alexandria and Syene was approximately 800 kilometers, because he hired a man to pace it out. Eight hundred kilometers times 50 is 40,000 kilometers: so that must be the circumference of the Earth. — Carl Sagan

And he believed it too, believed, in that moment, that the arrow he had made for himself would continue its long upward motion. As if there was no possibility of return, no aphelion or perihelion to chart the long spiral of his orbit around whatever false burning center he had made.
Know this. That the things that go into the fire are forever changed. That all you have ever done can be measured not by distance but by circumference. That these twin spirals of smoke: they are your life, rising in curls. — Christian Kiefer

Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance. Those that walk with vigor, three hours a day, will pass in seven years a space equal to the circumference of the globe. — Samuel Johnson

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

What is happening to our world is almost too colossal for human comprehension to contain ... To contemplate its girth and its circumference, to attempt to define it, to try and fight it all at once, is impossible. The only way to combat it is by fighting specific wars in specific ways. — Arundhati Roy

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

The opening for solid waste is very small [in the space ship]. It's not toilet-bowl size. And aim is critical. To be honest with you, you don't know where your asshole is pointing within a small circumference. — Mike Mullane

Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information - — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I will venture to say there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit [in London], than in all the rest of the kingdom. — Samuel Johnson

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series. Every general law only a particular fact of some more general law presently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. — Blaise Pascal

Time that weakens all things else has but strengthened the impregnable position of the believer's faith and hope and confidence. And as, year by year, the tree adds another ring to its circumference, every age has added the testimony of its events to this great truth. The grass withereth, and the flower fadeth, but the word of the Lord shall endure forever. — Thomas Guthrie

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

The Golden Ratio defines the squaring of a circle. Stated in mathematical terms, this says: Given a square of known perimeter, create a circle of equal circumference. According to some, in ancient Egypt, this mathematical mystery was encoded in the measurements of the Great Pyramid of Giza. — Marja De Vries

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

Passing just lately over this lake, ... and examining this water next day, I found floating therein divers earthy particles, and some green streaks, spirally wound serpent-wise, and orderly arranged, after the manner of the copper or tin worms, which distillers use to cool their liquors as they distil over. The whole circumference of each of these streaks was about the thickness of a hair of one's head ... all consisted of very small green globules joined together: and there were very many small green globules as well. [The earliest recorded observation of the common green alga Spyrogyra.] — Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek

When we are babies ... we need an authoritative figure to guide and take care of us. We ask no questions about that authority and imagine that the small circumference of family life is the limit of the universe ... As we mature, our horizon expands and we begin to question. This continues until we either throw over our creators
our parents
for good and take their place as the creative force in our lives or find replacements for them because the terror and responsibility are too great. People go one way or the other, and this accounts for all of the great personal and political divides throughout history. — Charlotte Rogan

It's not perfect, this thing between us, like trying to bring the two circles of our lives together, and living in the small, tight space where they intersect, everything else pushed to the circumference, until we step back inside our very different, very separate orbs. — Leylah Attar

Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances - the village, the platoon, the work unit, the monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighborhood - these formed the true circumference of one's world, some twenty or so speaking parts, as if they were in a play together. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The timepiece had been a birthday gift from Arian, his nineteen-year-old cousin in Tehran. It was plastered with pastoral steel and had the Faravahar hieroglyph sketched on it. This ancient pictogram was the symbol of a guardian angel. A remnant of a primeval daemon designed to protect the Persians. The clock's circumference was decorated with the flowers of life and in the middle there was a scripture written in cuneiform that read Good Deeds, Good Thoughts & Good Words. — Soroosh Shahrivar

The world has no circumference. It would certainly have a circumference if it had a centre, in which case it would contain within itself its own beginning and end; and that would mean that there was some other thing which imposed a limit to the world - another being existing in space outside the world. All of these conclusions are false. Since, then, the world cannot be enclosed within a material circumference and centre, it is unintelligible without God as its centre and circumference. — Nicholas Of Cusa

Imagine a person with a gift of ridicule [He might say] First that a negative quantity has no logarithm; secondly that a negative quantity has no square root; thirdly that the first non-existent is to the second as the circumference of a circle is to the diameter. — Augustus De Morgan

The perfume that her body exhaled was of the quality of that earth-flesh, fungi, which smells of captured dampness and yet is so dry, overcast with the odour of oil of amber, which is an inner malady of the sea, making her seem as if she had invaded a sleep incautious and entire. Her flesh was the texture of plant life, and beneath it one sensed a frame, broad, porous and sleep-worn, as if sleep were a decay fishing her beneath the visible surface. About her head there was an effulgence as of phosphorous glowing about the circumference of a body of water - as if her life lay through her in ungainly luminous deteriorations - the troubling structure of the born somnambule. — Djuna Barnes

To be sensuous means to become aware of the circumference, and to be spiritual means to become aware of the center. Sensuousness is the beginning of spirituality. Become more and more sensuous; that is the way of being alive. — Osho

The two-point rhythm of walking's stride clears the mind for thinking. (N.B.: Perhaps, after telling the spinal circuits to "take a walk," the forebrain shifts to automatic pilot, so to speak, freeing the neocortex to ponder important issues of the day.) Many philosophers were lifetime walkers, who found that bipedal rhythms facilitated creative contemplation and thought. In his short life, e.g., Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles--ten times the circumference of earth. — David B. Givens

There is in the universe neither center nor circumference. — Giordano Bruno

Our nation, which possesses greater resources than any other, is rent, from center to circumference, with party strife, political intrigues, and sectional interest; our counselors are panic stricken, our legislators are astonished, and our senators are confounded. — Joseph Smith Jr.

After the island of Sebu follow immediately the island of Mindanao, an island of more than three hundred leguas in circumference, and Jolo, which is small. Lower down is the island of Borneo, a very large island, more than five hundred leguas in circumference. All of these islands are densely populated, although that of Borneo is not subdued. Neither is that of Mindanao in entirety, but only the river of Botuan, Dapitan, and the province and coast of Caragan. — Antonio De Morga

Life may be circular but its circumference keeps getting wider for us to grow. — Balroop Singh

THE TRUTH OF THE VERY SMALL
When he is born, a baby's head is filled with the knowledge of space. The circumference of his skull is as infinite as the twirlings of the universe. His eyes look out with the blur of eyes which see for all species. He has remembered his own nature from past patterns. Now his heart beats through rock, sky, oceans. He feels the silence and the sound all around the world beneath his skin.
We all hold somewhere deep within us the truth we accepted in innocence. The seas, the forests, the soil, the atmosphere, are all vital parts of an ongoing system. By harming any part of it we must ultimately harm ourselves. It is that simple. — Jay Woodman

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points. — William James

My business is circumference. — Emily Dickinson

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

God is immanent in every atom, all-pervading, all-sustaining,all-evolving; He is its source and its end, its cause and its object, its centre and circumference; it is built on Him as its sure foundation, it breathes in Him as its encircling space; He is in everything and everything in Him. — Annie Besant

There will be a machina mundi whose centre, so to speak, is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere, for God is its circumference and centre and He is everywhere and nowhere. — Nicholas Of Cusa

The circumference of life cannot be rightly drawn until the center is set. — Benjamin E. Mays

The physical heart, which houses the spiritual heart, beats about 100,000 times a day, pumping two gallons of blood per minute and over 100 gallons per hour. If one were to attempt to carry 100 gallons of water (whose density is lighter than blood) from one place to another, it would be an exhausting task. Yet the human heart does this every hour of every day for an entire lifetime without respite. The vascular system transporting life-giving blood is over 60,000 miles long - more than two times the circumference of the earth. So when we conceive of our blood being pumped throughout our bodies, know that this means that it travels through 60,000 miles of a closed vascular system that connects all the parts of the body - all the vital organs and living tissues - to this incredible heart. — Hamza Yusuf

Shane never knew how to address her friends' parents. She wanted to call her Mrs. Eliot's Mom, but knew that the cutesiness would not be appreciated. "Mrs. Kaspar" sounded too like a phone solicitor, which would not do after having kissed the circumference of her son's neck. — Thomm Quackenbush

These soliloquies explain our people's lack of stability
You keepin it real, but ain't got a clue what reality really be
See the diameter of your knowledge
Is the circumference of your activity — Ras Kass

God is he whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. — Sue Monk Kidd

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere. — Blaise Pascal

One of the reasons it has seemed so difficult for a person to change his habits, his personality, or his way of life, has been that heretofore nearly all efforts at change have been directed to the circumference of the self, so to speak, rather than to the center. — Maxwell Maltz

The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already harmed the village, the waves of consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see is circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby. Awaken her to the inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could invent small resources insisted on culpability. Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars. — Maxine Hong Kingston

You must fill every inch of your body with the asana from your chest and arms and legs to the tips of your fingers and toes so that the asana radiates from the core of your body and fills the entire diameter and circumference of your limbs. You must feel your intelligence, your awareness, and your consciousness in every inch of your body. — B.K.S. Iyengar

The view of the moon that we've been having recently is really spectacular. It fills about three-quarters of the hatch window, and of course we can see the entire circumference even though part of it is in complete shadow and part of it is in earthshine. It's a view worth the price of the trip. — Neil Armstrong

Cast away your sloth, your lethargy, your coldness, or whatever interferes with your chaste and pure love for Christ, your soul's husband. Make Him the source, the center, and the circumference of all your soul's range of delight. — Charles Spurgeon

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

The larger the searchlight, the bigger the circumference of the unknown.
-anonymous physicist — Norm Schriever

The moon! It smiled at her with all its might, she could see it! through the broken wood beams of a crude ceiling, nearly touch its cratered surface, stroke its circumference; oh, moon! bulbous and benevolent, guiding herds across planes on forlorn journeys; elucidating wisps of mist to lovers at midnight; absent to her for years but treasured still. — K.I. Hope

I've loved you since the first moment I clapped eyes on you in Latin class. Since that day in the rain, when you climbed into my car and slipped my sweater over your head to get warm. Since the first time I watched you with Jamie, laughing and joking even though the weight of the world was on your shoulders. Since I saw you running in crazy, breathless circles around the circumference of my favorite tree, a look of absolute joy on your face." He traced a finger down my cheek. "I've loved you since before I even knew what love was. — Julie Johnson

Man is the center of a circle without a circumference, except the one he creates for himself. — Mahatma Gandhi

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

Pain - expands the Time - / Ages coil within / The minute Circumference / Of a single Brain - / Pain contracts - the Time - / Occupied with Shot / Gamuts of Eternities / Are as they were not - — Emily Dickinson

That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it. — Thomas Hardy

Man's cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring. You can go round and round it, you can polish it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby you will make it bulge out the other, but you will NEVER, while the world endures and man is man, increase its total circumference. — H. Rider Haggard

Columbus therefore cheated on his calculations, as the examining faculty of the University of Salamanca quite correctly pointed out. He used the smallest possible circumference of the Earth and the greatest eastward extension of Asia he could find in all the books available to him, and then exaggerated even those. Had the Americas not been in the way, Columbus' expeditions would have failed utterly. — Carl Sagan

You will have to relax from the circumference. The first step in relaxing is the body. Remember as many times as possible to look in the body, whether you are carrying some tension in the body somewhere - at the neck, in the head, in the legs. Relax it consciously. Just go to that part of the body, and persuade that part, say to it lovingly "Relax!" — Rajneesh

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

Like man himself, who is the only one not to know his own glance, the [Eiffel] Tower is the only blind point f the total optical system of which it is the center and Paris the circumference. — Roland Barthes

Today Eratosthenes' method [of calculating the circumference of the earth] seems almost banal ... yet it is inaccessible to prescientific civilizations, and in all of Antiquity not a single Latin author succeeded in stating it coherently. — Lucio Russo

The reason why the Great Pyramid of Giza has Earth's circumference figure embedded in it is not because ancient Egyptians knew that number, but because they were observing the horizon and the lunar movement. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

Love is the centre and circumference; The cause and aim of all things
'tis the key To joy and sorrow, and the recompense For all the ills that have been, or may be. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox