Flatland Quotes & Sayings

Without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there's really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn't come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious. — Maxine Greene

She padded toward Han, barefoot, like a faerie startled out of a forest bower, bewitching mix of clan and flatland beauty. — Cinda Williams Chima

Yet at least we can admire the wise Prearrangement which has ordained that, as they have no hopes, so they shall have no memory to recall, and no forethought to anticipate, the miseries and humiliations which are at once a necessity of their existence and the basis of the constitution of Flatland. — Edwin A. Abbott

STUDYING TIME MACHINES IN FLATLAND — Sean Carroll

Inez, I'm sorry," Thomas said quietly, his expression earnest. "I had no choice. You were dying, and besides you agreed to the turn the night before. Didn't you?" He frowned and muttered, "Of course, it was right after you'd nearly drowned and you might not have really understood what was going on at the time. Do you even love me? You nodded to that too, but ... " He raised his head and said solemnly, "I'm sorry if you're upset about being turned, but I'm not sorry for doing it. Because whether you love me or not, Inez, I love you. You're strong, and brilliant and sweet and have a strength I've never seen in other women. This last week you've done whatever was required of you to help find Marguerite without complaint or allowing fear to stop you, even going so far as being the bait in the trap." He scowled and then admitted, "Though I have to say I thought that was rather foolish. I was really pissed at you for putting your life at risk like that. — Lynsay Sands

Living, as I do, in an educated and scientific atmosphere, I could not have conceived that the first principles of zoology were so little known. Is it possible that you do not know the elementary fact in comparative anatomy, that the wing of a bird is really the forearm, while the wing of a bat consists of three elongated fingers with membranes between? — Arthur Conan Doyle

SHE CAME ALONG THE ALLEY AND UP THE BACK STEPS THE WAY she always used to. Doc hadn't seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe & the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, — Thomas Pynchon

Her point is that, contrary to the prevailing flatland postmodern view, not only is cultural evolution not an ethnocentric or eurocentric notion, it is the only way out of the hidden ethnocentrism of most "progressive" circles of Western social science, which in fact discourage the cultural evolution that alone would transcend the ethnocentrism. In other words, although they nobly desire to alleviate oppression, the anti-cultural-evolutionists are part of the very disease they so aggressively denounce. But — Ken Wilber

Mesarovic and Pestel are critical of the Forrester-Meadows world view, which is that of a homogeneous system with a fully predetermined evolution in time once the initial conditions are specified. — Donella Meadows

We can't even say what it is we're missing. It's like you can feel the hole, but you don't know what's supposed to fill it, because it's something you've never seen. You don't want it to be every man for himself, but it sort of is. And there's not much you can do about it. I don't mean to talk in riddles. — Catherine Ryan Hyde

Nietzsche said we will never rid ourselves of God because we have too much faith in grammar/language.

Lacan said because of the religious tenets of language, religion will triumph.

Chomsky, master linguist, says 'there are no skeptics. You can discuss it in a philosophy seminar but no human being can - in fact - be a skeptic.'

These musings shed light on Soren K's leap to faith idea. This is more nuanced than the circular leap of faith argument he's been wrongly accused of...

Soren is saying that, as we use the logic of language to express existence and purpose, we will always leap TO faith in a superior, all encompassing, loving force that guides our lives.

This faith does not negate our reason. It simply implies that the reasoning of this superior force is superior to our own. Edwin Abbott crystalizes this in Flatland. — Chester Elijah Branch

If our highly pointed triangles of the soldier class are formidable, it may be readily inferred that far more formidable are our women. For if a soldier is a wedge, a women is a needle; being, so to speak, all point, at least at the two extremities. Add to this the power of making herself practically invisible at will, and you will perceive that a female, in Flatland, is a creature by no means to be trifled with. — Edwin A. Abbott

PowerPoint is like being trapped in the style of early Egyptian flatland cartoons rather than using the more effective tools of Renaissance visual representation. — Edward R. Tufte

The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensiona l;
the paper is static, flat. How are we to represent
the rich visual world of experience and
measurement on mere flatland? — Edward Tufte

You are not a man, but a feminine monstrosity with a bass voice! — Edwin A. Abbott

Today the major reason for our interest in Flatland is that for the first time we can achieve some of the dreams of our ancestors a century ago and obtain direct visual experience of phenomena in a dimension higher than our own. — Thomas Banchoff

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space. — Edwin A. Abbott

In the end, the photographer shot a close-up of Troy holding a photo of himself waiting in a much more interesting line fifteen years ago.
It was a humiliating setback for them as individuals and for the line as a whole. — Rainbow Rowell

The day will never come in when I lose enough respect for my own hide to shit on a Texan's mother, Stuart. — Stephen King

Abandoning the flatland ages past, And finding mountains much more to their taste, They toil in labyrinthine caverns, dense With gases that are metal's noble source; 10770 They separate, combine, test, trying to Discover things undreamt of hitherto. By spirit power, subtly, they construct Forms clear and crystalline, without defect; Then in the crystal's eternal silence peering, Perceive what in the upper world is occurring. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The slicing technique from Flatland still remains one of the most powerful tools for dealing with aggregates in higher dimensions. — Thomas Banchoff

In all human cultures, the social world has two clear dimensions: a horizontal dimension of closeness or liking, and a vertical one of hierarchy or status ... Now imagine yourself happily moving around your two-dimensional social world, a flat land where the X axis is closeness and the Y axis is hierarchy. Then one day, you see a person do something extraordinary, or you have an overwhelming experience of natural beauty , and you feel lifted "up." But it is not the "up" of hierarchy, it's some other kind of elevation. This chapter is about that vertical movement. My claim is that the human mind perceives a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension that I will call "divinity. — Jonathan Haidt

In the mind of a woman, to give birth to a child is the short cut to omniscience. — Gelett Burgess

If only the right person would have to leave, everyone else would be able to stay in the country. — Herta Muller

Even from just a little thing, it's still possible to die. — CLAMP

For Christmas, 1939, a girl friend gave me a book token which I used to buy Linus Pauling's recently published Nature of the Chemical Bond. His book transformed the chemical flatland of my earlier textbooks into a world of three-dimensional structures. — Max Perutz

Immerse yourself in the mesmerising patchwork of flatland invaded by water, desolate roads of industrial obsolescence, and a dark history — Ben Handicott