Quotes & Sayings About Parabola

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I heave the basketball; I know it sails in a parabola, exhibiting perfect symmetry, which is interrupted by the basket. It's funny, but it is always interrupted by the basket. — Michael Jordan

Those of us who embrace the feminine know its strength. — Betsy Cornwell

What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one. — George Orwell

The suggestion that the body really wanted to go straight but some mysterious agent made it go crooked is picturesque but unscientific. It makes two properties out of one; and then we wonder why they are always proportional to one another - why the gravitational force on different bodies is proportional to their inertia or mass. The dissection becomes untenable when we admit that all frames of reference are on the same footing. The projectile which describes a parabola relative to an observer on the earth's surface describes a straight line relative to the man in the lift. Our teacher will not easily persuade the man in the lift who sees the apple remaining where he released it, that the apple really would of its own initiative rush upwards were it not that an invisible tug exactly counteracts this tendency. (The reader will verify that this is the doctrine the teacher would have to inculcate if he went as a missionary to the men in the lift.) — Arthur Stanley Eddington

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water. — D.H. Lawrence

As an artist, you don't think about the parabola or the arc you're describing or where you're going to ultimately end up, you're just kind of crawling around, seeing what's out there. — Michael Nesmith

Where once I prayed for forgiveness from a father God who held up huge palms and said "Thou shalt not," now I find peace with a sister god who takes my open hands in hers and says, "You will. — Betsy Cornwell

The conventional parabola
sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness
was to him shameful and hypocritical. — Ian Fleming

Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos. — Edward Bellamy

All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home. — Paul Theroux

It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest ... — Jan Morris

But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice
guessed and refused to believe
that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children ... — Thomas Pynchon

He was speaking to me, one eyebrow arched like a parabola, his face closed with resolve, impassioned with purpose, yet calm, as if he was so good at what he did he didn't need to break a sweat. — C.D. Reiss

I am a Prince," he replied, being rather dense. "It is the function of a Prince - value A - to kill monsters - value B - for the purpose of establishing order - value C - and maintaining a steady supply of maidens - value D. If one inserts the derivative of value A (Prince) into the equation y equals BC plus CD squared, and sets it equal to zero, giving the apex of the parabola, namely, the point of intersection between A (Prince) and B (Monster), one determines value E - a stable kingdom. It is all very complicated, and if you have a chart handy I can graph it for you. — Catherynne M Valente

The curve of life is like the parabola of a projectile which, disturbed from its initial state of rest, rises and then returns to a state of repose ... Like a projectile flying to its goal, life ends in death. Even its ascent and its zenith are only steps and means to this goal ... For, enlightenment or no enlightenment, consciousness or no consciousness, nature prepares itself for death. — Carl Jung

Here's the thing about New York, the thing I love most: there is no such substance as silence. If you ever stop talking, and he stops talking, the city takes over for you. A siren forms a distant parabola of sound. A door slams. The old couple in 4A argues over who will answer the telephone. The young lovers in 2C reach an animalistic climax. A million other lives play out on your doorstep, and not one of them gives a damn about your little problems. Life goes on and on and on. — Beatriz Williams

Cassidy's heart tried to leap out through his taught skin and hop into his wet hands. But outwardly it was all very calm, very serene, just as always, and it seemed to last a tiny forever, just like that, a snapshot of them all on the curved parabola of a starting line, eight giant hearts attached to eight pairs of bellows-like lungs mounted on eight pairs of supercharged stilts. They were poised on the edge of some howling vortex they had run 10,000 miles to get to. Now they had to run one more — John L. Parker Jr.

And there in the middle, high above Prechistensky Boulevard, amidst a scattering of stars on every side but catching the eye through its closeness to the earth, its pure white light and the long uplift of its tail, shone the comet, the huge, brilliant comet of 1812, that popular harbinger of untold horrors and the end of the world. But this bright comet with its long, shiny tail held no fears for Pierre. Quite the reverse: Pierre's eyes glittered with tears of rapture as he gazed up at this radiant star, which must have traced its parabola through infinite space at speeds unimaginable and now suddenly seemed to have picked its spot in the black sky and impaled itself like an arrow piercing the earth, and stuck there, with its strong upthrusting tail and its brilliant display of whiteness amidst the infinity of scintillating stars. This heavenly body seemed perfectly attuned to Pierre's newly melted heart, as it gathered reassurance and blossomed into new life. — Leo Tolstoy