Inverse Quotes & Sayings

I've learned the dangerous lesson of the web: You succeed by giving up control, and that's inverse of the normal campaign. — David Weinberger

There's an inverse relationship between my temper and my ability to control my accent. If you hear me say 'Fiddledeedee', run for the hills, because I'm getting ready to take out bystanders. — Molly Harper

Anything I run across can light up the circuitry of my brain, and set me on an adventure. To research strains of yeast; hiccup fetishists; the proper use of inverse, obverse, converse and reverse; the ratio of main narrative to tangent, of forward action to aside. What else do we do but quest, pursue meaning in the information wash? Where does that storm sewer opening from the river into the city's underneath go to, anyhow? I grab a headlamp and head in. It's long and low and dark and stinks and extends for miles. Underneath the city is another city. The one above begins to disappear. That's what we're after, isn't it? To disappear? To venture into darkness, to let what we know or think we know recede for an hour, a day, a novel's length, and see what meaning can be made of what remains? — Ander Monson

I've developed a theory that there's an inverse relationship between money and imagination. That if you've got lots of imagination then you don't really need much money, and if you've got lots of money then you won't bother with much imagination. — Alan Moore

Because gratitude is the key to happiness, anything that undermines gratitude must undermine happiness. And nothing undermines gratitude as much as expectations. There is an inverse relationship between expectations and gratitude: The more expectations you have, the less gratitude you will have. — Dennis Prager

It was a distorted form of inverse logic: If hopes never come true, then hope for what you don't want. — Amy Tan

It strikes me that the power or capability of a man in getting rich is in inverse proportion to his reflective powers and in direct proportion to his impudence. — Paul Sochaczewski

I am genuinely sorry for scientists of the younger generation who never knew Fisher personally. So long as you avoided a handful of subjects like inverse probability that would turn Fisher in the briefest possible moment from extreme urbanity into a boiling cauldron of wrath, you got by with little worse than a thick head from the port which he, like the Cambridge mathematician J. E. Littlewood, loved to drink in the evening. And on the credit side you gained a cherished memory of English spoken in a Shakespearean style and delivered in the manner of a Spanish grandee. — Fred Hoyle

inverse of the word live is evil. — Ben Okri

There's a perceived inverse relation between looks and talent. Look at Charlize Theron - she made herself ugly for 'Monster' and suddenly everyone said 'she's a genius.' It shouldn't be like that. — Lena Headey

I knew you would come," he said, "in the end. I have been waiting a long, long time."
Time seemed to change as he spoke its name, bending out of shape, out of rhythm, curving round to encapsulate them in their own miniature cosmos. The past was coiled around the future: the present was an isolated moment, belonging nowhere, trapped at random in a maze of inverse reflections. — Jan Siegel

[Walmart]s largest innovation consists in getting rid of the central Fordist principle of paying the workers enough so that they can afford to buy what they manufacture. Instead, WalMart has pioneered the inverse principle: paying the workers so little that they cannot afford to shop anywhere other than at WalMart. It might even be said, not too hyperbolically, that WalMart has singlehandedly preserved the American economy from total collapse, in that their lowered prices are the only thing that has allowed millions of the "working poor" to retain the status of consumers at all, rather than falling into the "black hole" of total immiseration. WalMart is part and parcel of how the "new economy" has largely been founded upon transferring wealth from the less wealthy to the already-extremely-rich. — Steven Shaviro

[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living. — Sir Laurens Van Der Post

Tolstoy's definition of art is the inverse of the truth; the task of art is to transform not perception into feeling, but feeling into perception. — Raphael Soyer

Love is an act of art ... It is this creative quality of love, that it seeks to reshape the world for its sake and to create happiness, which makes love radical and potentially seditious ... the inverse is also true: art is an act of love. — Rod Dubey

People's intelligence tends to be in inverse proportion to their number. People don't tend to get smarter as they get into bigger groups. — Robyn Hitchcock

Now of the difficulties bound up with the public in which we doctors work, I hesitate to speak in a mixed audience. Common sense in matters medical is rare, and is usually in inverse ratio to the degree of education. — William Osler

Nobody cares about feminist academic writing. That's careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted ... But I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ratio to its usefulness - and what you write in inverse relationship to its understandability. [ ... ] Academics are forced to write in language no one can understand so that they get tenure. They have to say 'discourse', not 'talk'. Knowledge that is not accessible is not helpful. — Gloria Steinem

His friends will decline in their numbers as his needs increase. The inverse, or perverse, mathematics ay life. — Irvine Welsh

One hundred thirty-seven is the inverse of something called the fine-structure constant ... The most remarkable thing about this remarkable number is that it is dimension-free ... Werner Heisenberg once proclaimed that all the quandaries of quantum mechanics would shrivel up when 137 was finally explained. — Leon M. Lederman

Drag for me is costume, and what I'm trying to do is, sometimes I'll go around and wear makeup in the streets, turn up to the gig, take the makeup off, do the show, and then put the makeup back on. It's the inverse of drag. It's not about artifice. It's about me just expressing myself. So when I'm campaigning in London for politics, I campaign with makeup on and the nails. It's just what I have on, like any woman. — Eddie Izzard

Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? — Alan Greenspan

I had not thought of this regular decrease of gravity, namely that it is as the inverse square of the distance; this is a new and highly remarkable property of gravity. — Christiaan Huygens

The intellectual distinction of a house and its smartness are generally in inverse rather than direct ratio. — Marcel Proust

Why do people benefit in inverse proportion to their need? Well, market incentives make that happen. — Bill Gates

People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence. Such words are nevertheless an apt vehicle for conveying the disparate treatment accorded to different groups. Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated brusquely by others, their complexities trampled upon and their singularities ignored. — Alain De Botton

The number of medals on an officer's breast varies in inverse proportion to the square of the distance of his duties from the front line. — Charles Edward Montague

And maybe I can let go of the sting and resentment of the path not taken, because the path not taken isn't just the inverse of who I am. It's an infinitely branching system that represents all the permutations of my life... — Blake Crouch

The Sabbath is an inverse-reversion for self-seduction, an undoing for a divertive conation. Sex is used as the technique and medium of a magical act. There is not only erotic satisfaction; the sensualist is made detached and controlled until final sublimation; his whole training is submissive and obedient until, by cold amoral passion, he can transmute control and divert him- or herself where desired. — Anonymous

Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with time. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death. — Don DeLillo

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
- Love and Tensor Algebra — Stanislaw Lem

THE PROJECTIONIST
The projectionist can make you believe whatever she believes. If she believes interest rates are going to fall, and you have a short conversation with the Projectionist, you will too. If she believes that, no, in fact, you didn't signal when you turned left, causing the Projectionist to ram her car into the back of yours, so will you.
Her downfall began when she fell in love with the Inverse. She absolutely, 100% fell in love with the Inverse. She projected all this emotion onto him but the Inverse, being the Inverse, simply reflected the opposite of everything she was sending.
Strangely, neither the Inverse nor the Projectionist can let go of the relationship. — Andrew Kaufman

How Not to Talk to Your Kids, The inverse power of praise. — Mattison Grey

I have long held the opinion that the amount of noise that anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity and therefore be regarded as a pretty fair measure of it. — Arthur Schopenhauer

There is usually an inverse relationship between how much something is on your mind and how much it's getting done. — David Allen

One thing I will say - my job gets harder and harder. The more you understand about what you are capable of, the less the instrument can do it physically. It's an inverse equation, if that's the right phrase. I just slammed those two words together. It sounded right. — Alan Rickman

The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance. — Eric Hoffer

Do not regret the things you didn't do," Tamika said. "If you're going to regret something, it has to be the things you have done. We are not made up of the inverse of our experiences. If we were what we didn't do, I would be a ballerina. — Rose Christo

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved. — Aldous Huxley

'Memorial Day' is about 'spring break' girls-gone-wild culture which is the seedy underbelly of our American Puritanism, the inverse side of the coin. It's also about how we forcefully exported that culture and then pretended to not know what we were doing. — Josh Fox

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. — Stanislaw Lem

A politicians willingness to listen to good advice rises in inverse proportion to how badly he thinks he is doing. — Patrick Caddell

The usefulness of a meeting is in inverse proportion to the attendance. — Lane Kirkland

Gods also remain important because of their functions. We can turn to places with relatively less religiosity to see why gods are so important everywhere else. In Sacred and Secular (2004), the political scientists Pippa Norris of Harvard and Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan show that, in prosperous regions where secular forms of social services and justice become really effective, religiosity dwindles. This inverse relationship between secular justice and economic equality and religious adherence suggests that the social functions of religion can be co-opted by secular institutions, thus rendering our obsession with what God knows and cares about more or less irrelevant. — Anonymous

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held. — Aldous Huxley

Wise or unwise, who doubts for a moment that contentment is the cause of happiness? Yet the inverse is true: we are contented because we are happy, and not happy because we are contented. Well-regulated minds may be satisfied with a small portion of happiness; none can be happy with a small portion of content. — Walter Savage Landor

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork. — Alain De Botton

'Lost' seems to be the inverse of 'Air': It explores dispossession and identity by forcing a bunch of people into one invented landscape instead of using many invented landscapes to keep people apart. — G. Willow Wilson

And it is likely that Rudy had teammates for whom the inverse was true - they were a 5 on talent and just a 2 on time invested, which is clearly a waste of talent. — Tom Rath

Is it a stale remark to say that I have constantly found the interest excited at a playhouse to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for admission? — Charles Lamb

Attachment exerted an invisible but powerful pull on the child, just as heavenly bodies are connected by gravitational forces. But unlike gravity, attachment makes its presence known by a negative inverse square law: the further the attached person is from their secure base, the greater the pull of attachment. The 'elastic band' which constitutes the attachment bond is slack and imperceptible in the presence of a secure base. If the secure base becomes unreliable or the limits of exploration are reached, the bond tugs at the heartstrings. — Jeremy Holmes

Girls possess sexual tact in inverse proportion to their standard of education. — John Fowles

That this subject [of imaginary magnitudes] has hitherto been considered from the wrong point of view and surrounded by a mysterious obscurity, is to be attributed largely to an ill-adapted notation. If, for example, +1, -1, and the square root of -1 had been called direct, inverse and lateral units, instead of positive, negative and imaginary (or even impossible), such an obscurity would have been out of the question. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

There's an idea I came across a few years ago that I love: My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance and in inverse proportion to my expectations. That's the key for me. If I can accept the truth of 'This is what I'm facing - not what can I expect but what I am experiencing now' - then I have all this freedom to do other things. — Michael J. Fox

Addictive behavior is kind of the inverse of procrastination: procrastination is about not being able to do what you want to do, addiction about not being able to not do what you don't want to do (drink, use drugs, etc.) — James Surowiecki

The influence of the senses has, in most men, overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. Yet, time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most people are average. Founders are not. Founders' traits seem to have an inverse normal distribution to them. — Peter Thiel

I consider myself to be an inverse paranoid. I always operate as if everything is part of a universal plot to enhance my well-being. — Jack Canfield

But I have always found that there's an inverse relationship between the number of people in a room and the amount of useful work that can be done. — John Scalzi

He ... discovered that people's goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position ... — Richard Flanagan

It seems that the desire to oppress others is so ingrained in many humans that they readily distort even a liberating theory or concept into its inverse, creating another wall of defense against positive change. Ultimately, an unbiased observer of human behavior must conclude that most action is not shaped by theory, but rather theories are shaped to conform to actions we have no intention of changing. — Marjorie Spiegel

Deception, as practically manifested, succeeds because of two things. First, the object of deception is convincingly deceptive in its design; i.e., it looks/feels/acts like the real thing. Second, and equally important, the subject of deception must be predisposed to believing that the object of deception is indeed the real thing. These two criteria work in an inverse relationship with each other; a sufficiently deceptive object can convince a skeptical subject, while a subject who sincerely wants to believe will be able to overlook even gross flaws in the object onto which he or she confers belief. — John Scalzi

People always related to President Bush, but in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, his numbers collapsed because people didn't feel like he handled those properly. Obama is the inverse. He was elected because he was an extraordinary guy, but the fact that he isn't ordinary has turned out to be politically damaging. — Nicolle Wallace

Your lips, an inverse chaos of stars. — Gwen Calvo

A beverage of leisure is a serious business," Shane Bowermaster was known to declare. "There can be no product of pleasure without the inverse on the end of the producer. — Jeff Phillips

The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigor of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The ability to rebound is in inverse proportion to the distance your house is from the nearest railroad tracks. — Don Meyer

This solidarity can grow only in inverse ratio to personality ... Solidarity which comes from likenesses is at its maximum when the collective conscience completely envelops our whole conscience and coincides in all points with it ... when this solidarity exercises its force, our personality vanishes, as our definition permits us to say, for we are no longer ourselves, but the collective life. — Emile Durkheim

One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They haven't all emerged yet, but new circles tattoo the water, here and there, a coppery red. When the wind lifted their edges, each would reveal a little shadowy spot, a dot of black which seemed to flash on the water, and so across the whole surface of the pond there was what could only be described as the inverse of sparkling; a scintillant blackness. Shining blackly, black but rippling, lyrical: the sheen and radiance of death-in-life.
Is that my work, to point to the world and say, See how darkly it sparkles? — Mark Doty

Many people strive for success in order to find happiness when, in fact, the inverse is true. Strive for happiness and you shall find success. — Steve Maraboli

The truth of death is a peculiar thing. For when they leave us the beloved are as if they never were. They vanish from this earth and vanish from the air. What remains are moors and mountains, the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign. We are the wolves. We are the lions. After so many nights treading the banks with the dogs and my brothers, intent on some mettlesome purpose I did not truly understand, night after night I dreamed of the river. I dream it now: a river of stolen perfumes, winding its way through our inverse Eden. — Sarah Hall

What [software] must not do is not the inverse of what it must do. — Nancy Leveson

There is a distinct evolutionary advantage to being fuzzy, as much of the mammal kingdom had discovered, particularly when you wanted a human to scratch your back. The dwarven evolutionary tree had embraced this concept wholeheartedly only to discover that once you started talking and expressing opinions a human's desire to scratch your back became directly inverse to how fuzzy it was. — Jeffery Russell

The moon is not kept in her orbit round the earth, nor the earth in her orbit round the sun, by a force that varies merely in the inverse ratio of the squares of the distances. — Thomas Malthus

To insist that I am not forgiven is a kind of inverse arrogance. — Lawrence Fagg

Sales managers need to be good leaders. How do they do it? Good leaders effectively communicate their goals and objectives while they focus on doing their job ProActively, and let their people focus on their job. If this is true, then the inverse must be true. — William Miller

Circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell - the strange inverse sense of apartheid. — Chris Abani

The admiration of another writer's work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style. — Ann Beattie

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing. — Jacob M. Appel

The Sufis have said: 'The importance of something is in inverse proportion to its attractiveness. — Idries Shah

My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations. — Michael J. Fox

Four circles to the kissing come, The smaller are the benter. The bend is just the inverse of The distance from the centre. Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb There's now no need for rule of thumb. Since zero bend's a dead straight line And concave bends have minus sign, The sum of squares of all four bends Is half the square of their sum. — Frederick Soddy

Suddenly stopped myself, knowing, by an inverse logic familiar to superstitious people, that the very foretaste of sorrows to come presumed a degree of joy beforehand and would no doubt stand in the way of the very joy I was reluctant to consider for fear of forfeiting it. I felt no different than a castaway who, on glimpsing a sailboat from a high perch on his deserted island, omits to light a pyre because he's spied too many such ships before and doesn't want his hopes dashed again. But — Andre Aciman

At American weddings, the quality of the food is in inverse proportion to the social position of the bride and groom. — Calvin Trillin

The value of an ad is in inverse ratio to the number of times it has been used. — Raymond Rubicam

There is an inverse correlation between the complexity of society and of word structure! — Guy Deutscher

I verily believe that a man's way with women is in inverse ratio to his prowess among men. The weakling and the saphead have often great ability to charm the fair sex, while the fighting man who can face a thousand real dangers unafraid, sits hiding in the shadows like some frightened child. — Edgar Rice Burroughs

The influence of the senses have in men overpowered the thought to the degree that the walls of time and space have come to look solid, real and insurmountable.. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the power of the mind. Man is capable of abolishing them both. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

We know, for instance, that there is a direct, inverse relationship between frequency of family meals and social problems. Bluntly stated, members of families who eat together regularly are statistically less likely to stick up liquor stores, blow up meth labs, give birth to crack babies, commit suicide, or make donkey porn. If Little Timmy had just had more meatloaf, he might not have grown up to fill chest freezers with Cub Scout parts. — Anthony Bourdain

It was the inverse of an island in the sea. — Elisabeth Eaves

Speaking generally, sociability stands in inverse ratio with age. A little child raises a piteous cry of fright if it is left alone for only a few minutes; and later on, to be shut up by itself is a great punishment. Young people soon get on very friendly terms with one another; it is only the few among them of any nobility of mind who are glad now and then to be alone; - but to spend the whole day thus would be disagreeable. A grown-up man can easily do it; it is little trouble to him to be much alone, and it becomes less and less trouble as he advances in years. An old man who has outlived all his friends, and is either indifferent or dead to the pleasures of life, is in his proper element in solitude; and in individual cases the special tendency to retirement and seclusion will always be in direct proportion to intellectual capacity. For — Arthur Schopenhauer

The secure attachment of Western psychology is actually akin to Buddhist non-attachment; avoid-ant attachment is the inverse of being mindful and present; and anxious attachment aligns with Buddhist notions of clinging and grasping. — Sharon Salzberg

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. — Thomas Pynchon

A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made. — Thomas De Quincey

The cult of friendship disturbs me. It's like our quality is supposed to be measured by the number of friends we have. For me, it's quite the inverse. When somebody says "I'm friends with everyone" I just assume they have the spine of your average jellyfish and the integrity of your average soap dish.
"I have tons of close friends!" Ok, then you obviously have no standards. "I've slept with lots of people!" Good, I will shake your hand from inside this Hazmat suit. It's like you have to have friends or you're nothing, and you gotta have lots of friends, and the more friends you have the more value you have. This Is a way of lowering our standards to fit in.
I'm a big fan of quality over quantity. Everyone wants to look at their life like it's a beer commercial they can just climb into. The larger the circle of friends the more alcohol is involved to blind yourself to the fact that you cant stand most of these assholes. — Stefan Molyneux

I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children's books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on "Snow" when I was eight. I said aloud, "I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like." And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily, without question. We become blunt and callous and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years. — Sylvia Plath

Karma, God, Earthquake, Natural disasters,
Posted on May 2, 2015 by Priyavrat Thareja
The Earthquakes, Tsunamis, etc are God's smaller initiatives to a bigger correction, implemented in single steps. The prioritisation of place, time and logistics is set by mankind in inverse relationship to the Karma. — Priyavrat Thareja

All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important information. In recent years, however, I have noticed that my gratification is becoming diluted by a certain weary indignation. They tell me because they regard me as safe. All of them, they make their disclosures to me in the same spirit that they might tell a castrato or a priest - with a sense that I am so outside the loop, so remote from the doings of the great world, as to be defused of any possible threat. The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance. — Zoe Heller

Bayes's theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes's theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions - or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called. — Bill Bryson