“A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”

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Jeff VanderMeer24

American writer 1968

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“The square is spiritually charged. It is the product of mankind, it is not copied from nature like the circle.”

Roger Raveel (1921–2013) painter

version in original Flemish (citaat van Roger Raveel, in het Vlaams): Het vierkant is een geestelijk geladen ding. Het is het product van de mens, het is niet afgekeken van de natuur zoals de cirkel. <br class="br">Quote of Raveel, from his interview in the Dutch newspaper N.R.C., 1991; as cited by Din Pieters in 'Raveel: het vierkant als onbeschreven blad' https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/1996/01/05/raveel-het-vierkant-als-onbeschreven-blad-7294323-a1018022, in N.R.C.-online, 5 Jan. 1996 (translation: Fons Heijnsbroek) <br class="br">1990's

“Yes it was 1949. How I came to that. That's like how one gets to know a human being. It so happens that I've always had a preference – as everyone has prejudices and preferences – for the square as a shape in preference to the circle as a shape. And I have known for a long time that a circle always fools me by not telling me whether it's standing still or not. And if a circle circulates you don't see it. The outer curve looks the same whether it moves or does not move. So the square is much more honest and tells me that it is sitting on one line of the four, usually a horizontal one, as a basis. And I have also come to the conclusion that the square is a human invention, which makes it sympathetic to me. Because you don't see it in nature. As we do not see squares in nature, I thought that it is man-made. But I have corrected myself. Because squares exist in salt crystals, our daily salt. We know this because we can see it in the microscope. On the other hand, we believe we see circles in nature. But rarely precise ones. Mature, it seems, is not a mathematician. Probably there are no straight lines either. Particularly not since Einstein says in his theory of relativity that there is no straight line, rod knows whether there are or not, I don't. I still like to believe that the square is a human invention. And that tickles me. So when I have a preference for it then I can only say excuse me.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

“The universe was made on purpose, the circle said.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 24 (p. 431)
Context: The universe was made on purpose, the circle said. In whatever galaxy you happen to find yourself, you take the circumference of a circle, divide it by its diameter, measure closely enough, and uncover a miracle — another circle, drawn kilometers downstream of the decimal point. There would be richer messages farther in. It doesn't matter what you look like, or what you're made of, or where you come from. As long as you live in this universe, and have a modest talent for mathematics, sooner or later you'll find it. It's already here. It's inside everything. You don't have to leave your planet to find it. In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.

“Hippocrates… is said to have proved the theorem that circles are to one another as the squares on their diameters, and it is difficult to see how he could have done this except by some form, or anticipation, of the method”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

of exhaustion
Achimedes (1920)

“No one ever squared the circle with so much genius, or, excepting his principal object, with so much success.”

Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799) French mathematician

Attributed to Montucla in Augustus De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes, (London, 1872), p. 96; Cited in: Robert Edouard Moritz. Memorabilia mathematica; or, The philomath's quotation-book, (1914) p. 366
About Gregory St. Vincent, described by De Morgan as "the greatest of circle-squarers, and his investigations led him into many truths: he found the property of the arc of the hyperbola which led to Napier's logarithms being called hyperbolic."

“Is revenge a circle inside of a circle inside of a circle?”

Sherman Alexie book Flight

Source: Flight

“A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

"A Circular Play," from Last Operas and Plays (1949) [written in 1920]
Context: A beauty is not suddenly in a circle. It comes with rapture. A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.

“Hippocrates himself is an example of the concurrent study of the two departments. On the one hand, he was the first of the Greeks who is known to have compiled a book of Elements. This book, we may be sure, contained in particular the most important propositions about the circle included in Euclid, Book III. But a much more important proposition is attributed to Hippocrates; he is said to have been the first to prove that circles are to one another as the squares on their diameters (= Eucl. XII., 2) with the deduction that similar segments of circles are to one another as the squares on their bases. These propositions were used by him in his tract on the squaring of lunes, which was intended to lead up to the squaring of the circle. The latter problem is one which must have exercised practical geometers from time immemorial. Anaxagoras for instance is said to have worked at the problem while in prison.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

p, 125
Achimedes (1920)

“You mention the circle and I agree with your definition.... why does the circle fascinates me? It is (1) the most modern form, but asserts itself unconditionally, (2) a precise but inexhaustible variable, (3) simultaneously stable and unstable, (4) simultaneously loud and soft, (5) a single tension that caries countless tensions within it. The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form, and in balance. Of the three primary forms (triangle, square, circle), it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote from Kandinsky's letter to Will Grohmann, c. 1926; as cited in Kandinsky, Frank Whitford, Paul Hamlyn Ltd, London 1967, p. 36
1920 - 1930

“There are countless circles of hell; believers never penetrate the ninth circle.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

“Inferno,” p. 151
The Sun Watches the Sun (1999)

“A circle looks at a square and sees a badly made circle.”

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Jeff VanderMeer24

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