“Though we cannot SEE angles, we can INFER them, and this with great precision.”
Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 5. Of Our Methods of Recognizing One Another
Context: Though we cannot SEE angles, we can INFER them, and this with great precision. Our sense of touch, stimulated by necessity, and developed by long training, enables us to distinguish angles far more accurately than your sense of sight, when unaided by a rule or measure of angles.
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Edwin Abbott Abbott 87
British theologian and author 1838–1926Related quotes

"Religion and Literature" (1935), in Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)

Source: What is Man? (1938), p. 180
Context: When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick. He overreaches himself, the work denies itself to him, the incarnation of the spirit no longer takes place, and to avoid the threat of senselessness he snatches after empty power. This sickness casts the genius on to the same level as those hysterical figures who, being by nature without power, slave for power, in order that they may enjoy the illusion that they are inwardly powerful, and who in this striving for power cannot let a pause intervene, since a pause would bring with it the possibility of self-reflection and self-reflection would bring collapse.

“But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?”
Source: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

“Our beliefs about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we can be”

"Address at a Luncheon Meeting of the National Industrial Conference Board (33)", (13 February 1961) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx
1961