Quotes & Sayings About Motion

The waitress scuttles away, and I make a shooing motion at the old couple who're still glaring.
"Don't you have something to better to work on?" I hiss. "Like golfing or eating prunes or dying?"
The old lady looks shocked.
"Okay, sorry, not dying. But seriously, prunes are good for you. — Sara Wolf

I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry. — Andrew Motion

Newton's three laws of motion are less a product of novel experiments than of the attempt to reinterpret well-known observations in terms of motions and interactions of primary neutral corpuscles — Thomas S. Kuhn

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require ... The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university where it was the practice of the students to recite adherence to Newton's laws of motion, to Maxwell's equations and to the electromagnetic theory of light. We should not deplore it the less if our own pet theory happened to be included, or if the list were brought up to date every few years. We should say that the students cannot possibly realise the intention of scientific training if they are taught to look on these results as things to be recited and subscribed to. Science may fall short of its ideal, and although the peril scarcely takes this extreme form, it is not always easy, particularly in popular science, to maintain our stand against creed and dogma. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

"Glorious, stirring sight!" murmured Toad ... "The poetry of motion! The real way to travel! The only way to travel! Here today - in next week tomorrow! Villages skipped, towns and cities jumped- always somebody else's horizons! O bliss! O poop-poop! O my! O my!" — Kenneth Grahame

People travel to wonder
at the height of the mountains,
at the huge waves of the seas,
at the long course of the rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars,
and yet they pass by themselves
without wondering. — Augustine Of Hippo

We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life. — Theodore Dreiser

It appears, from all that precedes, reasonably certain that if there be any relative motion between the earth and the luminiferous ether, it must be small; quite small enough entirely to refute Fresnel's explanation of aberration. — Albert A. Michelson

Nokia and Research in Motion needed a modern operating system. They could have bought Palm or Android before Google did, but they didn't. Today, it's probably too late, and at the time they would have been criticized for overpaying, but as they say - shift happens. — Marc Andreessen

True power is stillness within motion. — Laozi

[The heart is] really a fascinating organ. It's about the only organ in the body that you can really witness its function. Doing things. And so on. Some of the other organs you can witness, like the intestines, will have this sort of peristaltic motion. But nothing that can compare with the activity of the human heart. — Denton Cooley

Arcade:HELLO, Deadpool. Ready for a fun filled day in Murderworld?
Deadpool: Yup. I've got my sunscreen on and I've taken my motion sickness pills so bring on the rides!
Arcade: Oh, I don't think you understand. You're going to die here.
Deadpool: I know! Carnivals always slay me.
Arcade: No. You are going to physically die... as in stop breathing. You will cease to exist.
Deadpool: Riiiiiight... So do you have bumper cars here?
Arcade: Arrrgh!
YES,PEOPLE,THAT'S RIGHT!I DISCOVERED WADE WILSON'S GENIUS!!!I'M BLESSED!!! — Fabian Nicieza

Emotion is energy in motion. — Peter McWilliams

This commissary was a man of very repulsive mien, with a pointed nose, with yellow and salient cheek bones, with eyes small but keen and penetrating, and an expression of countenance resembling at one the polecat and the fox. His head, supported by a long and flexible neck, issued from his large black robe, balancing itself with a motion very much like that of the tortoise thrusting his head out of his shell. — Alexandre Dumas

He sat in the chapel for hours picking his way through fugues. A dozen notes, hardly music. But then those few notes spoke to each other, subject and answer, by repetition, by diminution, by augmentation, even looping backwards on themselves in a course like the retrograde motion of Mars. He listened as if he had as many ears as fingertips, and, like a blind man, could feel textures that were barely there. At the end of two or three pages of music he would hear all the voices twining together in a construction of such dizzying power that the walls of the chapel could barely contain it. — Kate Grenville

Liberty, to define it, is nothing other than the absence of impediments to motion — Thomas Hobbes

When I was on the ice, in the lights, with the music and the motion, there was a certain kind of flirtation that gave great energy and expressiveness to my performance. — Peggy Fleming

We can still do a stop motion feature for about one-third of what it costs Pixar or DreamWorks or Blue Sky to make a feature. But nobody is interested in a film that cost $50 to 60 million with the potential to do $120 million. They want to risk big money to make huge money. — Henry Selick

We need to reflect with great seriousness about why many young people don't feel like getting married ... For fear of failure, many do not want to even think about it ... Many people believe the change that has taken place in recent decades was set in motion by the emancipation of women. But this argument is not valid, it is an insult, a form of misogyny. — Pope Francis

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species. — Samuel Johnson

For action, whatever its immediate purpose, also implies relief at doing something, anything, and the joy of exertion. This is the optimism that is inherent in, and proper and indispensable to action, for without it nothing would ever be undertaken. It in no way suppresses the critical sense or clouds the judgment. On the contrary this optimism sharpens the wits, it creates a certain perspective and, at the last moment, lets in a ray of perpendicular light which illuminates all one's previous calculations, cuts and shuffles them and deals you the card of success, the winning number. — Blaise Cendrars

External motion we call action; internal motion is human thought. — Swami Vivekananda

Anything you do from the soulful self will help lighten the burdens of the world. Anything. You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity, can cause to be set in motion ... Mend the part of the world that is within your reach. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

THIS is the story of an orgasm. Or it could be said this is the story of an orgasm that never was, and then was, and once it was, it's the story of all the ripples it set in motion. It's the reiteration of the total fecundity slam dance, Big Bang Explosion that created the world. — Sharon Weil

The everyday cares and duties, which men call drudgery, are the weights and counterpoises of the clock of time, giving its pendulum a true vibration and its hands a regular motion; and when they cease to hang upon its wheels, the pendulum no longer swings, the hands no longer move the clock stands still. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The geniuses who conduct the motion-picture business killed glamour when they decided that what the public wanted was not dream stuff, from which movies used to be made, but realism. — Hedda Hopper

Every kid has a toy that they believe is their best friend, that they believe communicates with them, and they imagine it being alive, their toy horse or car or whatever it is. Stop-motion is the only medium where we literally can make a toy come to life, an actual object. — Henry Selick

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life — Octavio Paz

I think fashion in motion is going to happen. I think that's the way things are going, but there are people who will still want to see a picture and to be able to hold it. — Kate Moss

Creativity is every company's first driver. It's where everything starts, where energy and forward motion originate. Without that first charge of creativity, nothing else can take place. — Nolan Bushnell

So I'll set a cycle in motion and pop it into record and I'll lay down a drum pattern, a bass line, a keyboard and guitar part, and once the groove is going I launch into the song and sing my song over the top. — Thomas Dolby

In the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University sits a battery-powered bell that has been ringing since the year 1840. The bell "rings" so quietly it's almost inaudible, using only a tiny amount of charge with every motion of the clapper. Nobody knows exactly what kind of batteries it uses because nobody wants to take it apart to figure it out. Sadly, there's no light hooked up to it. — Randall Munroe

There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring [making music] to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it. — William Shakespeare

The world is dictated by our desires rather than our thoughts. The prior puts the latter in motion. — Sarah Noffke

A quantified family would be upper middle class. Likely working in big tech," said Theodore. "Their employers would have required it." Piece by piece, the projectors filled in the available data on the house, including on the kitchen wall, a large screen of blurred graphs, smudged letters and numbers, all in motion. "This is the hearth," he said. "The data flickering at the heart of the family. Location, activity, well-being." He squinted at the screen. "Can you bring this into resolution? — Matthew De Abaitua

Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don't know why. It lives, and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion. — Louise Erdrich

Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change. — Robert Charles Wilson

These three laws of Kepler give a complete description of the motion of the planets around the sun. — Anonymous

The great Sir Isaac Newton, He once made a valid proclamation, That the forces equal to a nominated mass, when multiplied by acceleration That was the law of motion. — Richard Digance

He leaned against the railing of the gazebo and crossed his arms over his chest. "You've gotta give me some incentive, babe." "Hmm. Like this kind of incentive?" She slid her hands to her breasts. His breath hitched when she squeezed the lush mounds with her palms, the motion making her tits look bigger, fuller. With an impish smile, she stroked the underside of each breast, circling her nipples with her fingers and then dragging her thumbs over each hard bud. — Elle Kennedy

Never mistake motion for action. — Ernest Hemingway,

I'm an early bird, partly because I like to have some quiet time and partly because by 9am emails begin arriving, the phone starts ringing and I have dragons to kill of one sort or another. — Andrew Motion

I don't want to hold you and feel so helpless I don't want to smell you and lose my senses And smile in slow motion With eyes in love. — Rufus Wainwright

This uncovered a number of basic features of our thought processes: that the mind deploys a set of rival frames that can construe even the most plodding everyday event in more than one way; that a frame for thinking about a change of location in real space can be metaphorically extended to conceptualize a change of state as motion in state-space; and that when the mind conceives of an entity as being somewhere or going somewhere, it tends to melt it down to a holistic blob. — Steven Pinker

My first yak was fairly quiet and looked a noble steed with my Mexican saddle and gay blanket among rather than upon his thick black locks. His back seemed as broad as that of an elephant, and with his slow, sure, resolute step, he was like a mountain in motion. — Isabella Bird

Jack laughed at my attempts to avoid being felt up by a mythical beast. "Apparently you're a virgin."
"Shut up!Like that's any of your business!"
He shrugged,the motion less effective upside down."Unicorns love maidens. Haven't you done any research at all?"
"What,you have?"
He flipped off the branch,startling the unicorn so badly it bolted from the meadow. Thank heavens. — Kiersten White

Thus it is awkward to call motion-sickness a migraine attack, but we may very conveniently term it a migranoid reaction, and note, in support of its affinities, that a large minority (almost 50 per cent, according to Selby and Lance) of adult migraine sufferers experienced severe motion-sickness in — Oliver Sacks

In our everyday garden grow the rosemary, juniper, ferns and plane trees, perfectly tangible and visible. For these plants that have an illusory relationship with us, which in no way alters their existentiality, we are merely an event, an accident, and our presence, which seems so solid, laden with gravity, is to them no more than a momentary void in motion through the air. Reality is a quality that belongs to them, and we can exercise no rights over it. — Leo Lionni

It's important to remember something: California is not a state built on moderation. We invented motion pictures. We made an electric sports car. We're both the brain (Silicon Valley) and the heart (Hollywood, alas) of this great nation, and meanwhile we grow everyone's strawberries. We're open to innovation. We're open to new ideas. We're open to odd couples - and to strays from all parts of the world. Look at our last governor: an Austrian body builder and son of a Nazi married to John F. Kennedy's niece. Anything can happen. — Scott Hutchins

But there are forces that don't let you turn back and undo things, because to do so would be to deny what is already in motion, to unwrite and erase passages, to shorten the arc of a story you don't own. — Salvador Plascencia

Tobias wasn't entirely sure what happened next. All of a sudden everyone was in motion, and Tobias hit the carpet behind the couch face down with one arm wrenched behind his back. "Get the light, Phan! Light!" Noah barked, planting a knee in Tobias' back to keep him down. Tobias sighed, fighting the instinct to move; Noah would break his arm. "This really isn't my night," he said. ~ after Tobias sneaks up on Noah & Phan in the dark while they're watching a horror flick — Chris Owen

Philosophy is thinking in slow motion. It breaks down, describes and assesses moves we ordinarily make at great speed - to do with our natural motivations and beliefs. It then becomes evident that alternatives are possible. — John Campbell

At the root of all power and motion, there is music and rhythm, the play of patterned frequencies against the matrix of time. We know that every particle in the physical universe takes its characteristics from the pitch and pattern and overtones of its particular frequencies, its singing. Before we make music, music makes us. — Joachim-Ernst Berendt

The indolence I love is not that of a lazy fellow who sits with his arms across in total inaction, and thinks no more than he acts, but that of a child which is incessantly in motion doing nothing, and that of a dotard who wanders from his subject. I love to amuse myself with trifles, by beginning a hundred things and never finishing one of them, by going or coming as I take either into my head, by changing my project at every instant, by following a fly through all its windings, in wishing to overturn a rock to see what is under it, by undertaking with ardor the work of ten years, and abandoning it without regret at the end of ten minutes; finally, in musing from morning until night without order or coherence, and in following in everything the caprice of a moment. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Law, in its most general and comprehensive sense, signifies a rule of action; and is applied indiscriminately to all kinds of action, whether animate, or inanimate, rational or irrational. Thus we say, the laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well as the laws of nature and of nations. And it is that rule of action, which is prescribed by some superior, and which the inferior is bound to obey. — William Blackstone

It wasn't the first time I played on death's porch, but it didn't mean that I was used to it either. It was weird how in the movies your whole life okays out in slow motion. It was nothing like that. It was horrible. — Adrienne Woods

Who gave you the ability to contemplate the beauty of the skies, the course of the sun, the round moon, the millions of stars, the harmony and rhythm that issue from the world as from a lyre, the return of the seasons, the alternation of the months, the demarcation of day and night, the fruits of the earth, the vastness of the air, the ceaseless motion of the waves, the sound of the wind? — Gregory Of Nazianzus

Their way of Dancing, is nothing but a sort of stamping Motion, much like the treading upon Founders Bellows. — John Lawson

There's a large cluster of stars that are orbiting the center of our galaxy. And by measuring the motion of stars, and in particular, their orbits, we can figure out whether or not there's a central black hole. — Andrea M. Ghez

This beginning motion, this first time when a sail truly filled and the boat took life and knifed across the lake under perfect control, this was so beautiful it stopped my breath ... — Gary Paulsen

So ended the formative period in [his] life, the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of his future identity. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it isn't the same for all of us. Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in. — Ian Caldwell

Power comes from body position in the form of leverage at delivery and the wrist and hand motion at release. — Human Kinetics

Before making a great movement, stay motionless for a good while! If you give legs to the rocks, they will start running like crazy horses! Stillness accumulates liveliness; laziness accumulates industriousness; sleep accumulates motion! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

As Pliable and Christian find themselves walking together toward the narrow gate, we see the stark contrast between the two pilgrims. One is burdened; the other is not. One is clutching a book that is a light to his path. The other is guideless. One is on the journey in pursuit of deliverance from besetting sins and rest for his soul. The other is on the journey in order to obtain future delights that temporarily dazzle his mind. One is slow and plodding because of his great weight and a sense of his own unrighteousness; the other is light-footed and impatient to obtain all the benefits of Heaven. One is in motion because his soul has been stirred up to both fear and hope; the other is dead to any spiritual fears,
longings, or aspirations. One is seeking God; the other is seeking self-satisfaction. One is a true pilgrim; the other is false and fading.
15. — John Bunyan

Even the earliest cave paintings in France and Spain had natural motion. — Gerald Vizenor

What's happened to her? The person that she is seems like a shell designed to cover up the person that Harold once knew her to be. — Dexter Palmer

The warm humid air of New York clung to the night, unwilling to relinquish its suffocating hold. And yet to Eva, the city had an underlying hum of possibility; a constant forward motion that promised, no matter what, that change was on its way. — Kathleen Tessaro

So much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy, and to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil. — Laurence Sterne

Do you think anger is a sincere emotion or the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? — Andrea Gibson

IT has been observed by several gentlemen, in vindication of this motion, that if it should be carried, neither my life, liberty, nor estate will be affected. — Robert Walpole

I want to be a jazzman until the day I die. To help keep that motion, momentum and movement going, for myself, for my students, for the people who hear me. Oh sure, some days you look around at this country and look at the evidence and think, Oh Lord, don't look good. But you keep moving. You gotta keep moving. — Cornel West

He wonders if it's some sort of twisted joke the adults are having, shoving hormonal teens into tight quarters but making it impossible to do anything but breathe.
"I wouldn't mind suffocating if it was with you," the girl says, which is flattering, but makes him even less interested in her.
"There'll be a better time," he tells her, knowing that such a time will never come - at least not for her - but hope is a powerful motivator.
Eventually they settle into a sort of symbiotic breathing rhythm. He breathes in when she breathes out, so their chests don't fight for space.
After a while, there's a jarring motion. With his arm now around the girl, he holds her a little more tightly, knowing that easing her fear somehow eases his own. — Neal Shusterman

When he could wait no longer, he levered his body over hers and entered her, his heavy shaft spreading her deliciously, pushing deep. The sway of the train rocked them exquisitely, the subtle hint of motion teasing her senses. Her inner muscles began to close on him helplessly, and he followed that secret rhythm, sensitive to her every need. — Lisa Kleypas

Ax: 100 Every thing doth naturally persevere in yt state in wch it is unlesse it bee interrupted by some externall cause, hence ... [a] body once moved will always keepe ye same celerity, quantity & determination of its motion. — Isaac Newton

World is sensation. We drift in an ocean of sensory stimuli: motion, color, texture, shape, heat, cold, natural symphonies of sound, an infinite number of scents, tastes beyond the human ability to catalogue. Nothing but sensation endures. Living things all die. Great cities do not last. — Dean Koontz

Wealth was the power to set things and people in motion; and in America, therefore, wealth came to be frankly regarded as the breath of God, the divine spirit immanent in man. God was the supreme Boss, the universal Employer. — Olaf Stapledon

Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are ... well ... human beings. — Terry Pratchett

I do not define time, space, place, and motion, as being well known to all. Only I must observe, that the common people conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects. And thence arise certain prejudices, for the removing of which it will be convenient to distinguish them into absolute and relative, true and apparent, mathematical and common. — Isaac Newton

I believe that there are people who think as I do, who have thought as I do, who will think as I do. There are those who will live, unconscious of me, but continuing my attitude, so to speak, as I continue, unknowingly, the similar attitude of those before me. I could write and write. All it takes is a motion of the hand in response to a brain impulse, trained from childhood to record in our own American brand of hieroglyphics the translations of external stimuli. How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but that is all that differentiates me from another person? - - - That I have banged into and assimilated various things? That my environment and a chance combination of genes got me where I am? — Sylvia Plath

When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us. — Lauren DeStefano

Pray be always in motion. Early in the morning go and see things; and the rest of the day go and see people. If you stay but a week at a place, and that an insignificant one, see, however, all that is to be seen there; know as many people, and get into as many houses as ever you can. — Lord Chesterfield

When physicists create a mathematical model of a physical process, they rely on the mathematical framework that can represent that process as closely as possible. When Newton developed a model of forces and motion, the appropriate mathematical framework was calculus. When Einstein developed a model of wave-particle motion, he relied on the mathematics of wave equations and eigenvalues. For many models in scientific computation, the computational framework that best aligns with our need is object orientation. — Anthony Scopatz

There were, in Clochemerle, a number of lady 'invalids', their conversation one long jeremiad concerning their health, who had worn out their husbands and outlived them by fifteen or twenty years. Since, all their lives, they had spent themselves only drop by drop, their extreme old age was still charged with vital fluid, flowing very meagrely yet sufficient to keep them on their feet and living, so to speak, vegetatively, behind mask-like countenances of wood or old ivory. They breathed in slow motion, everything about them was almost dead excepting those feeble pulsations of the heart which kept just enough pale blood flowing beneath their wrinkled skins. — Gabriel Chevallier

As someone who spends a lot of her time on the road, you have to look stylish but comfortable as I'm always in motion. Either traveling for my job, for pleasure, or managing the hectic pace of the modern day. — Maria Sharapova

There is no such thing as a really calm sea. Always, always, there is motion. — Agatha Christie

I mean, what's great about touring is that's what you do. You're in a constant state of motion and then you stop to do a show and you move onto the next city. All you have to do is do the show. That's the only responsibility that you have. — Margaret Cho

All of a sudden it hit me - If there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion. After all, there are melodic figures, why can't there be figures of motion? — Len Lye

Usually there is a paradox in what a character wants. A conflict is built deeply within them. And then you put them in motion, throw everything at them until they reveal themselves further. — Dana Spiotta

Less than 10% of the fuel energy burned in automobiles is translated into forward motion of the vehicle and even then most of this energy is needed to move the vehicle itself, which typically weighs 20 times more than its passengers. — David Suzuki

On board ship there are many sources of joy of which the land knows nothing. You may flirt and dance at sixty; and if you are awkward in the turn of a valse, you may put it down to the motion of the ship. You need wear no gloves, and may drink your soda-and-brandy without being ashamed of it. — Anthony Trollope

Until now I have never really lived! Life on earth is a creeping, crawling business. It is in the air that one feels the glory of being a man and of conquering the elements. There is an exquisite smoothness of motion and the joy of gliding through space. It is wonderful! — Gabriele D'Annunzio

Some men a forward motion love, But I by backward steps would move, And when this dust falls to the urn In that state I came, return. — Henry Vaughan

I didnt pay atteniton to times or distance, instead focusing on how it felt just to be in motion, knowing it wasn't about the finish line but how I got there that mattered. — Sarah Dessen

Dysfunctional muscles are generally not diseased, aging, or broken. They are starved of motion. — Pete Egoscue

How many feelings can one heart hold?... Infinite, Luna thought. The way the universe is infinite. It is light and dark and endless motion; it is space and time, and space within space, and time within time. And she knew: there is no limit to what the heart can carry. — Kelly Barnhill

The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel. — William Monahan

finding in motion, what was once in place — Brian Heffron

Some of our newspapers and magazines are more concerned with the welfare of their advertisers than they are with the dissemination of news and the discussion of matters of lasting importance ... Radio, television, motion pictures, popular books - all contribute ... to ... the stifling of dissent on all but the most banal levels ... a renunciation of the most basic and precious of democratic principles. — J. Paul Getty

Yet if anyone believes that the earth rotates, surely he will hold that its motion is natural, not violent. — Nicolaus Copernicus

When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence. — Vladimir Nabokov