Quotes & Sayings About Linear

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart. — Salman Rushdie

I do genuinely believe that the political system is not linear. When it reaches a tipping point fashioned by a critical mass of opinion, the slow pace of change we're used to will no longer be the norm. I see a lot of signs every day that we're moving closer and closer to that tipping point. — Al Gore

Our religion, with its beliefs, rituals, and dogmas becomes another segment among all the other segments that constitute our linear and fragmented existence. It offers us another set of possible acquisitions, even more tempting than all the others: a meaning to life, immortality, enlightenment, the kingdom of heaven. — Stephen Batchelor

All of audio as we know it is an attempt to be more and more perfectly linear. Linearity means higher quality sound. Hypersonic sound is exactly the opposite: it's 100 percent based on non-linearity. — Woody Norris

Well, the security business has been growing. I think security is one of those areas where it's to some degree not linear but maybe exponential growth. — Sanjay Kumar

The advent of the log-linear model ... has to some extent outdated the use of any single measure of association — Graham J.G. Upton

Out came an extraordinarily complex network of plastic, brass, and stainless-steel tubing, which in seconds Kona had assembled into what Quinn thought was either a very small and elegant linear particle accelerator or, more likely, the most complex bong ever constructed. — Christopher Moore

Working an integral or performing a linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense - or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place - requires a guiding human hand. When we teach mathematics we are supposed to be explaining how to be that guide. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel. — Jordan Ellenberg

My life hasn't been conventional and it hasn't been linear. I've had to make it up as I've gone along, which has taught me a lot. If you don't accept the obvious options that are laid out for you, it's up to you to work out where you're going and to create your own specific rules and goals. — Beth Ditto

I'm a linear thinking agnostic, but not an atheist folks. — Neil Peart

I never write in a linear way. And I tell students not to. You can only know so much about a book when you first start. — Carol Anshaw

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly ... time-y wimey ... stuff. — Steven Moffat

In my early teens, I heard about Naked Lunch and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, Naked Lunch was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a rectum is penetrated, and that death-by-hanging produces spontaneous trouser tents. The first Burroughs I read was Naked Lunch, but I buried myself in a few of his stories, and thus the arc of my recollection is just as non-linear as his narrative. — Peter Dube

We are not just highly evolved animals with biological computers embedded inside our skulls; we are also fields of consciousness without limits, transcending time, space, matter, and linear causality. — Stanislav Grof

We must remember that science is a way of using empirical evidence to better understand our world. We are all scientists, just many of us are not very good ones. However, we are all capable of exercising our intellects in a purposeful, linear pursuit of knowledge. — Chris Matakas

I believe in stories that are non-linear, as we are (hopefully) — Natasha Tsakos

You like to think that people, in general, and I mean on the scale of generations, are learning from their mistakes, getting better. But with what all I seen, I don't know if I could believe that. — Taylor Brown

Those who are doggedly attached to the idea they began with may well execute on that idea. And do it well and fast. But along the way, they often miss so many unanticipated possibilities, options, alternatives, and paths that would've taken them away from that linear focus on executing on the vision, and sent them back into a place of creative dissidence and uncertainty, but also very likely yielded something orders of magnitude better. — Ashwin Sanghi

We all learn best in our own ways. Some people do better studying one subject at a time, while some do better studying three things at once. Some people do best studying in structured, linear way, while others do best jumping around, surrounding a subject rather than traversing it. Some people prefer to learn by manipulating models, and others by reading. — Bill Gates

I basically look at how exponential emerging technological changes runs counter-intuitive to the way our linear brains make projections about change, and so we don't realize how fast the future is coming. — Jason Silva

Bahaism gives you a pluralistic view, and a lot of aspects of Hinduism give you a moral framework with no accountability other than the karmic system. There's no linear movement or point of accountability toward God. — Ravi Zacharias

I have come to believe that energy medicine is a practice of healing that is dependent upon the energy of time. Whereas allopathic medicine uses linear time as a fundamental healing measure. Energy medicine needs to understand the dynamic of chiros time, that is the time without time. — Caroline Myss

[I]t is rather the past and the future which are the fleeting illusions, and the present which is eternally real. We discover that the linear succession of time is a convention of our single-track verbal thinking, of a consciousness which interprets the world by grasping little pieces of it, calling them things and events. But every such grasp of the mind excludes the rest of the world, so that this type of consciousness can get an approximate vision of the whole only through a series of grasps, one after the other. — Alan W. Watts

But why must choices always lie along a linear spectrum with two poles instead of say among a sphere of possibilities — David Mazzucchelli

I had a lot of great lakes of ignorance that I was up against, I would write what I knew in almost like islands that were rising up out of the oceans. Then I would take time off and read, sometimes for months, then I would write more of what I knew, and saw what I could see, as much as the story as I could see. And then at a certain point I had to write out what I thought was the plot because it was so hard to keep it all together in my head. And then I started to write in a more linear way. — Rebecca Miller

Life isn't really linear. Although it's generally perceived that way. The stories we tell are woven like snakes around a divining rod. A center of time containing all that's ever been told and heard. Remembered and forgotten. Lost and found. Our pasts, presents and futures are unwound, stretched flat, cut into pieces and held up with human arms. — Thomas Lloyd Qualls

There is a new science of complexity which says that the link between cause and effect is increasingly difficult to trace; that change (planned or otherwise) unfolds in non-linear ways; that paradoxes and contradictions abound; and that creative solutions arise out of diversity, uncertainty and chaos. — Andy Hargreaves

Life is not linear, it is organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help create for us — Ken Robinson

Watch out for art, Crake used to say. As soon as they start doing art, we're in trouble. Symbolic thinking of any kind would signal downfall, in Crake's view. Next they'd be inventing idols, and funerals, and grave goods, and the afterlife, and sin, and Linear B, and kings, and then slavery and war. Snowman longs to question them - who first had the idea of making a reasonable facsimile of him, of Snowman, out of a jar lid and a mop? But that will have to wait. — Margaret Atwood

You can't make poetry out of thought; poetry is passion. Linear thought must be seduced by wild mind, by the fires of ecstasy. — Jennifer Stone

It isn't so terrible to think logically and to be analytical; if we are designing a bridge or balancing a checkbook, that's the best way to think and the best way to be. But when we look carefully, we see that discursive, linear thinking is only useful for certain kinds of tasks; for others it is quite useless. Like the hammer or the toothbrush, discursive thought is a tool intended for certain kinds of jobs: If you use a hammer to brush your teeth, or a toothbrush to drive nails, you are not likely to meet with great success. — John Daishin Buksbazen

You've never heard of Chaos theory? Non-linear equations? Strange attractors? Ms. Sattler, I refuse to believe you're not familiar with the concept of attraction. — Michael Crichton

If there is anything certain in life, it is this. Time doesn't always heal. Not really. I know they say it does, but that is not true. What time does is to trick you into believing that you have healed, that the hurt of a great loss has lessened. But a single word, a note of a song, a fragrance, a knife point of dawn light across an empty room, any one of these things will take you back to that one moment you have never truly forgotten. These small things are the agents of memory. They are the sharp needle points piercing the living fabric of your life.

Life, my children, isn't linear where the heart is concerned. It is filled with invisible threads that reach out from your past and into your future. These threads connect every second we have lived and breathed. As your own lives move forward and as the decades pass, the more of these threads are cast. Your task is to weave them into a tapestry, one that tells the story of the time we shared. — Stephen Lee

I was struck by the way Europeans see history as something neatly linear. For me, it's not that; it's not some kind of straight railway. — Richard Flanagan

As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place. — Christopher Nolan

Genes are effectively one-dimensional. If you write down the sequence of A, C, G and T, that's kind of what you need to know about that gene. But proteins are three-dimensional. They have to be because we are three-dimensional, and we're made of those proteins. Otherwise we'd all sort of be linear, unimaginably weird creatures. — Francis Collins

In real life, when emotions and sentiments are involved and the very continuity of life is at stake, there are no quantitative theories, linear programming, and applied mechanics available to solve those problems. — Girdhar Joshi

Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else. — Peter Greenaway

Policy makers and politicians want more STEM; educators want more STEAM. Both, in ways that are eerily similar, are engaging in social engineering to support an ideology. At the macro-level, in both worlds, it's all about teaching a point of view, rather than teaching students to learn. We seem hell bent on an arbitrarily linear approach to engineering a "useful" or job-securing education, from which we continue to get mixed results. — Henry Doss

Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper. — J.R. Moehringer

I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot. — Steven Spielberg

Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate. — Sherry Turkle

Perhaps making movies is a step toward being able to move backward and forward and in and out of linear time. — Eleanor Coppola

Well, let's assume the world is linear. If we required a certain amount of troops per 25,000 population in the Balkans, if the world is not radically different, something of the same extent is going to be needed in Iraq. — Eric Shinseki

A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit. — Renata Adler

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel. — Hilary Mantel

We tend to see math and science as a steady state of facts rather than as the accumulated knowledge of linear traditions. As Korzybski put it, we see further because we "stand on the shoulders"5 of the previous generation. The danger of such a position is that we can forget to put our own feet on the ground. — Douglas Rushkoff

True thought is pre-physical. This is the thinking-behind-the-thinking responsible for all the genuinely consequential choices we make in the world. A thinking that is not dependent on linear deduction, but that moves fast as lightning, making connections on different levels, bringing them together. — Eben Alexander

Extraordinary success is sequential, not simultaneous. What starts out linear becomes geometric. You do the right thing and then you do the next right thing. Over time it adds up, and the geometric potential of success is unleashed. The domino effect applies to the big picture, like your work or your business, and it applies to the smallest moment in each day when you're trying to decide what to do next. — Gary Keller

I don't run away from the idea of philosophy as seductive. I want the sentences to be prose but intense prose, to show that, like life, thinking is not linear. — Stanley Cavell

My nature is to be linear, and when I'm not, I feel really proud of myself. — Cynthia Weil

A scientist must be a traveller, an explorer. Knowledge comes from experience. ... The path to enlightenment is never linear. — Joanne Owen

While American football is very structured and linear and static - where everyone lines up, and there's a burst, and it happens - soccer is like the cosmos. It's like constellations. It's bodies moving in space. It's a very spherical game. — Gabriel Luna

It's amazing how flexible the human mind is in terms of jumping into a backstory or an aside. Vonnegut is a great example - it's not a linear story by any means, but somehow your brain is keeping it moving in one direction even though the story is taking you in all these different directions. — Noah Hawley

The Lockean assumption that if we put our labor to it then it becomes our own is totally fallacious. We have to figure out how to leave things alone, and build an economic system that's not built on a linear model, but instead on a cyclical model, because that's the natural world - it's cyclical and not linear. That is going to take a lot of transformation. — Winona LaDuke

And my life - and my mess of a mind - needed shape. I had 'lost the plot'. There was no linear narrative of me. There was just mess and chaos. So yes, I loved external narratives for the hope they offered. Films. TV dramas. And most of all, books. They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive. — Matt Haig

Education is one of the most beautiful and liberating things we can pursue in our lives, but too often it is approached as a restrictive, punitive, linear, and moralistic act. — Jonathan Mooney

My own movement of thought is not meant to be a straight point-to-point, linear line of march, but horizontal exploration from one area of interest to another. There is no ultimate destination - no finish line to cross, no final conclusion to be reached. It's the way I feel about dancing - you move around a lot, not to get somewhere, but to be somewhere in time. — Robert Fulghum

I don't believe that life is linear. I think of it as circles - concentric circles that connect. — Michelle Williams

The eternal is omniembracing and permeative; and the temporal is linear. This opens up a very high order of generalizations of generalizations. The truth could not be more omni-important, although it is often manifestly operative only as a linear identification of a special-case experience on a specialized subject. — R. Buckminster Fuller

In principle, more analytic power can be achieved by varying multiple things at once in an uncorrelated (random) way, and doing standard analysis, such as multiple linear regression. In practice, though, A/B testing is widely used, because A/B tests are easy to deploy, easy to understand, and easy to explain to management. — Christopher D. Manning

If non-linear leaps in intelligence and ability are possible, why haven't these effects been observed in our schools? I believe the answer lies in the profound inertia of human thought: when an entire society believes something is impossible, it suppresses, by its very way of life, the evidence that would contradict that belief. — John Mighton

Because genes work in combination, the incremental effect of adding a new gene to a genome may be not linear, but exponential. — Gary F. Marcus

If we had enough data then this statistical approach would undoubtedly sort out these things, and a lot of problems are arising precisely because we haven't got enough documents for the statistical approach to be wholly valid. I know you can calculate levels of probability and so forth, but to establish this really clearly we want a lot more information than we have actually got available. This is surely our major problem that we are still at the very limits at which you can use a technique of this sort. - John Chadwick — Jennifer K. McArthur

Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction
a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology. — Louise J. Kaplan

Without subtext you have a flat, linear world; everything is literal, everything spoken is meant. With subtext the writer is able to access the gap between language and thought, and — John Yorke

The combination of stride rate (the number of strides per unit of time) and stride length (the distance covered in a single stride) primarily determines linear speed. So, athletes can improve linear speed by increasing stride rate while maintaining stride length, increasing stride length while maintaining stride rate, or doing a combination of both. — NSCA: National Strength And Conditioning Association

Most of my early records were not cohesive at all, just collections of demos recorded in different years. 'Odelay' was the first time I actually got to go in the studio and record a piece of music in a continuous linear fashion, although that was written over a year. — Beck

When you step outside of school and have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I've never been a purely linear thinker. You can see it in my rhymes. My mind is always jumping around, restless, making connections, mixing and matching ideas, rather than marching in a straight line. That's why I'm always stressing focus. My thoughts chase each other from room to room in my head if I let them, so sometimes I have to slow myself down. — Jay-Z

I think there will be 20 years of evolution from linear broadcast to internet television. — Reed Hastings

And it may be that history, as Michel Foucault tried to convince us, is a list of discrete, disconnected processes whose joint impact is not linked to any one of them but to their fusion into one big explosion. In that case, history is not just a linear movement of endless American support for Israel against, and at the expense of, the Palestinian cause but a more distorted, curved line of ups and downs that indicate possible changes in the future. Moreover, a concerted effort to bring about such a change is a worthy goal - inside and outside the United States. But what we have this year is the ominous call at the 2006 AIPAC convention for the United States to attack and invade Iran.38 — Noam Chomsky

There's a logic to dreams that doesn't necessarily follow linear narrative. You don't know why things happen, it's your subconscious pushing you, to give you information. — Justin Theroux

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world. — Paul Gibbons

Many think of memory as rote learning, a linear stuffing of the brain with facts, where understanding is irrelevant. When you teach it properly, with imagination and association, understanding becomes a part of it. — Tony Buzan

Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative. — Todd Haynes

The western mind is linear, the eastern mind is circular. — Rajneesh

In brief, the relationship between amount consumed and amount used for virtually all nutrients is not a linear relationship. — T. Colin Campbell

Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life. — Natalie Goldberg

You cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely. — Annie Leonard

You have visits, then you have disappearances. You enter, then you exit. You come, you go. It would be so great if you could just get to human enlightenment on a linear path. — Eve Ensler

Our guns go from safe to single shot to full auto, which is nice and linear and logical, but they (Russians) knew that would mean ninety-nine times in a hundred their guys would panic and ram the selector all the way home, and thereby fire off a whole magazine on the first hasty and unaimed shot. Which would leave them with an empty weapon right at the start of a firefight. Which is not helpful. So the AK selector goes safe, then full auto, then single shot. Not linear, not logical, but certainly practical. Single shot is a kind of default setting, and full auto is a deliberate choice. — Lee Child

I'm a creature of adaptation. I take advantage of the second and the moment. My comedy breathes; it's not really that predictable. I do have a linear style, but other than that, there's a lot of abstract. I just go off on what I'm thinking. I'm not that topical. I like to talk about me and my experiences. — Tommy Davidson

Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion. — Ray Kurzweil

Really, I'm incredibly disjointed and not candid. Just in general, my thoughts tend to come out in little spurts that don't necessarily connect. If you hang around long enough, you can find the linear path. But it will take a second. That is why these interviews never go well for me. — Kristen Stewart

A timeline is a linear representation of cause and effect, changing one event alters all that follow. — J.W. Lord

Humans don't connect their actions with what befalls them. Don't they perceive time as linear?"
"They do," said Aitassi. "They just don't see why they should do anything individually to change their future to the one they want. All eight billion of them. — Karen Traviss

All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning
not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf. — Michel Foucault

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life"
he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. — George Saunders

Of course my family and friends are incredibly valuable to me. They keep me sane, they teach me things and I love spending time with them. I think that ranking what you value is a sort of western and linear way of looking at things. — Julia Stiles

Do you think yourself a string too short to save? Do you think that you are lank and straight, a linear bit with no connection fore or aft? Fear not your insignificance. Nature has a drawer for you. Yes, nature garners all the string too short to save, and mice visit that drawer. Here's nesting material! Yes, you will be interwoven, be it now or later. — Sena Jeter Naslund

Adventrue rewrites the routine of our lives and wakes us sharply from the comforts of the familiar. It allows us to see how vast the expanse of our experience. Our ability to grow is no longer linear but becomes unrestricted to any direction we wish to run. — Josh Gates

Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia I s any more than a romance - half a fiction - in which all the successive identities are taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another "character" added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn't so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with "reason. — Thomas Pynchon

Death is simply a break in our linear stream of consciousness. — Robert Lanza

The big thing (that really good fiction) can do is leaping over that wall of self and portraying inner experience and setting up a kind of intimate conversation between two consciousnesses ... the trick is going to be trying to find a way to do it
and for a generation
whose relation to the long sustained, linear verbal communication is fundamentally different. — David Foster Wallace

The sun appears to pour itself down, and indeed its light pours in all direction, but the stream does not run out. This pouring is linear extension: that is why its beams are called rays, because they radiate in extended lines. You can see what a ray is if you observe the sun's light entering a dark room through a narrow opening. It extends in a straight line and impacts, so to speak, on any solid body in its path which blocks passage through the air on the other side: it settles there and does not slip off or fall. — Marcus Aurelius

Creativity is not linear, just like the earth is not flat ... If you keep going long enough you will always get back to where you started from. That is when you have lived a full life. That is the artist's path. — Nikki Sixx

Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Modern humans became fixated on a collective hallucination of linear time, ignoring the fractal spirals of the surrounding universe. — Daniel Pinchbeck

I saved you," Andersen said at last, slowly but firmly, like Pat was an idiot child who had to be reminded of the basic rules of the universe. To wit: Gravity exists. Time purports to flow in a linear fashion, but it's only trying to fool us. I saved you. — Alex Gabriel

People interpret things in a linear form but science proves otherwise. — Robin Sacredfire