“A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.”

—  Mark Twain

Quoting a schoolchild in "English as She Is Taught"

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 28, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle." by Mark Twain?
Mark Twain photo
Mark Twain 637
American author and humorist 1835–1910

Related quotes

Kate Bush photo

“We hang on to every line,
And walk straight down the middle of it.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Sensual World (1989)

Samuel Beckett photo

“I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line.”

Molloy (1951)
Context: Having heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble … and if I did not go in a rigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something.

Benoît Mandelbrot photo
Archimedes photo
Leonardo Da Vinci photo
Archimedes photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

As quoted in The Puzzle Instinct : The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life‎ (2004) by Marcel Danesi, p. 71 from Human All-Too-Human

Andrea Dworkin photo
Sarvajna photo
Milan Kundera photo

Related topics