“All experience is an arch, to build upon.”

Act IV, scene ii.
Duchess of Malfi (1623)

...Ut pendet continaum flexile, sic stabit contiguum rigidum, which is the Linea Catenaria.
Tr: As hangs the flexible line, so but inverted will stand the rigid arch.
Cypher at the end of his A Description of Helioscopes, and Some Other Instruments https://books.google.com/books?id=KQtPAAAAcAAJ (1676) p. 31, as quoted in "The Life of Dr. Robert Hooke," The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke https://books.google.com/books?id=6xVTAAAAcAAJ, Richard Waller (1705) English translation in Ted Ruddock, Arch Bridges and Their Builders 1735-1835 (1979) p. 46 https://books.google.com/books?id=amQ9AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA46

A History of the Lyre
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 28
Context: Religion isn't invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side—that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That's why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.

Source: 1800s, Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820), Ch. 1, plate 27, "To the Jews" 1) lines 9-12

"What These Children Are Like" (1963), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 548.

Page 82.
Invisible Cities (1972)

Source: Howards End (1910), Ch. 22
Context: She might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy-going.

Volume 1: Nightside the Long Sun (1993), Ch. 1
Fiction, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–1996)