Quotes about dimension
page 3

“The search continues for the absolute model-form which shall do justice to every dimension without loss of inner force.”

Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975) Austrian sculptor (23 April 1907, Vienna – 28 August 1975, Vienna)

Source: The Human Form: Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings, 1977, p. 8.

Jacques Bertin photo
Lynn Margulis photo

“Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves, and so it cannot so easily be fixed with a single number.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

with Richard Guerrero, "Two Plus Two Equals One: Individuals Emerge from Bacterial Communities" in Gaia 2: Emergence : the New Science of Becoming ed. William Irwin Thompson (1991).

V. V. Giri photo
Herbert Marcuse photo

“I study the lives on a leaf: the little
Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

"The Minimal," ll. 1-2
The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948)

Ernest Flagg photo
Thomas Chandler Haliburton photo

“Everything has altered its dimensions, except the world we live in. The more we know of that, the smaller it seems. Time and distance have been abridged, remote countries have become accessible, and the antipodes are upon visiting terms. There is a reunion of the human race; and the family resemblance now that we begin to think alike, dress alike, and live alike, is very striking. The South Sea Islanders, and the inhabitants of China, import their fashions from Paris, and their fabrics from Manchester, while Rome and London supply missionaries to the ‘ends of the earth,’ to bring its inhabitants into ‘one fold, under one Shepherd.’ Who shall write a book of travels now? Livingstone has exhausted the subject. What field is there left for a future Munchausen? The far West and the far East have shaken hands and pirouetted together, and it is a matter of indifference whether you go to the moors in Scotland to shoot grouse, to South America to ride and alligator, or to Indian jungles to shoot tigers-there are the same facilities for reaching all, and steam will take you to either with the equal ease and rapidity. We have already talked with New York; and as soon as our speaking-trumpet is mended shall converse again. ‘To waft a sigh from Indus to the pole,’ is no longer a poetic phrase, but a plain matter of fact of daily occurrence. Men breakfast at home, and go fifty miles to their counting-houses, and when their work is done, return to dinner. They don’t go from London to the seaside, by way of change, once a year; but they live on the coast, and go to the city daily. The grand tour of our forefathers consisted in visiting the principle cities of Europe. It was a great effort, occupied a vast deal of time, cost a large sum of money, and was oftener attended with danger than advantage. It comprised what was then called, the world: whoever had performed it was said to have ‘seen the world,’ and all that it contained. The Grand Tour now means a voyage round the globe, and he who has not made it has seen nothing.”

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865) Canadian-British politician, judge, and author

The Season-Ticket, An Evening at Cork 1860 p. 1-2.

Vitruvius photo

“Next comes the consideration of stone quarries from which dimension stone and supplies of rubble to be used in building are taken and brought together.”

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book II, Chapter VII "Stone" Sec. 1

Michael Moorcock photo
Samuel Bowles photo

“Paying attention is not just analyzing carefully; rather, it is a constructive act… What we build has only the dimensions we have given it.”

Ulric Neisser (1928–2012) American psychologist

Source: Cognitive Psychology, 1967, p. 96; As cited in: A.H.C. Van der Heijden (1996)

Richard Feynman photo

“I do feel strongly that this is nonsense! … So perhaps I could entertain future historians by saying I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction. … I don’t like it that they’re not calculating anything. … why are the masses of the various particles such as quarks what they are? All these numbers … have no explanations in these string theories – absolutely none! … I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, “Well, it might be true.” For example, the theory requires ten dimensions. Well, maybe there’s a way of wrapping up six of the dimensions. Yes, that’s all possible mathematically, but why not seven? When they write their equation, the equation should decide how many of these things get wrapped up, not the desire to agree with experiment. In other words, there’s no reason whatsoever in superstring theory that it isn’t eight out of the ten dimensions that get wrapped up and that the result is only two dimensions, which would be completely in disagreement with experience. So the fact that it might disagree with experience is very tenuous, it doesn’t produce anything.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

interview published in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything? (1988) edited by Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown, p. 193-194

C. N. R. Rao photo
Robert Fulghum photo
Willem de Sitter photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Alex Salmond photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Fritjof Capra photo

“What I am trying to do is to present a unified scientific view of life; that is, a view integrating life's biological, cognitive, and social dimensions. I have had many discussions with social scientists, cognitive scientists, physicists and biologist who question that task, who said that this would not be possible. They ask, why do I believe that I can do that? My belief is based largely on our knowledge of evolution. When you study evolution, you see that there was, first of all, evolution before the appearance of life, there was a molecular type of evolution where structures of greater and greater complexity evolved out of simple molecules. Biochemist who study that have made tremendous progress in understanding that process of molecular evolution. Then we had the appearance of the first cell which was a bacterium. Bacteria evolved for about 2 billion years and in doing so invented, if you want to use the term, or created most of the life processes that we know today. Biochemical processes like fermentation, oxygen breathing, photosynthesis, also rapid motion, were developed by bacteria in evolution. And what happened then was that bacteria combined with one another to produce larger cells — the so-called eukaryotic cells, which have a nucleus, chromosomes, organelles, and so on. This symbiosis that led to new forms is called symbiogenesis.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Capra (2007) in: Francis Pisani " An Interview with Fritjof Capra http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/69/25" in: International Journal of Communication Vol 1 (2007).

Ai Weiwei photo
Jane Roberts photo
Theo van Doesburg photo
Susie Bright photo
Fritjof Capra photo
Arthur Koestler photo
Theo van Doesburg photo
Viktor Schauberger photo

“We must look into unknown dimensions, into Nature, into that incalculable and imponderable life, whose carrier and mediator, the blood of the Earth that accompanies us steadfastly from the cradle to the grave, is water.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 103, p. 28 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

Stanislav Grof photo
Edwin Abbott Abbott photo

“The very fact that a Line is visible implies that it possesses yet another Dimension.”

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART II: OTHER WORLDS, Chapter 16. How the Stranger Vainly Endeavoured to Reveal to Me in Words the Mysteries of Spaceland

Richard Feynman photo

“I took this stuff I got out of your [O-ring] seal and I put it in ice water, and I discovered that when you put some pressure on it for a while and then undo it it doesn't stretch back. It stays the same dimension. In other words, for a few seconds at least, and more seconds than that, there is no resilience in this particular material when it is at a temperature of 32 degrees. I believe that has some significance for our problem.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

statement at hearing by Rogers Commission, 11 February 1986, Report of the PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, volume 4, p. 680 http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v4part4.htm#4; also quoted in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) by James Gleick, p. 423

Herbert Marcuse photo
Walt Disney photo

“We have created characters and animated them in the dimension of depth, revealing through them to our perturbed world that the things we have in common far outnumber and outweigh those that divide us.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

As quoted in How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life by Pat Williams, Jim Denney

Ben Carson photo

“The mind, once stretched by an idea, never returns to its original dimension.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 224

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo

“However convergent it be, evolution cannot attain to fulfilment on earth except through a point of dissociation. With this we are introduced to a fantastic and inevitable event which now begins to take shape in our perspective, the event which comes nearer with every day that passes: the end of all life on our globe, the death of the planet, the ultimate phase of the phenomenon of man. …
Now when sufficient elements have sufficiently agglomerated, this essentially convergent movement will attain such intensity and such quality that mankind, taken as a whole, will be obliged—as happened to the individual forces of instinct—to reflect upon itself at a single point; that is to say, in this case, to abandon its organo-planetary foothold so as to shift its centre on to the transcendent centre of its increasing concentration. This will be the end and the fulfilment of the spirit of the earth.
The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality.
The end of the world: the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega. …
Are we to foresee man seeking to fulfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally on a greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega? … Universal love would only vivify and detach finally a fraction of the noosphere so as to consummate it—the part which decided to "cross the threshold", to get outside itself into the other. …
The death of the materially exhausted planet; the split of the noosphere, divided on the form to be given to its unity; and simultaneously (endowing the event with all its significance and with all its value) the liberation of that percentage of the universe which, across time, space and evil, will have succeeded in laboriously synthesising itself to the very end. Not an indefinite progress, which is an hypothesis contradicted by the convergent nature of noogenesis, but an ecstasy transcending the dimensions and the framework of the visible universe.”

pp. 273, 287–289 https://archive.org/stream/ThePhenomenonOfMan/phenomenon-of-man-pierre-teilhard-de-chardin#page/n137/mode/1up/,
The Phenomenon of Man (1955)

Barry Eichengreen photo
Salvador Dalí photo
Herbert Marcuse photo

“No matter how close and familiar the temple or cathedral were to the people who lived around them, they remained in terrifying or elevating contrast to the daily life of the slave, the peasant, and the artisan—and perhaps even to that of their masters. Whether ritualized or not, art contains the rationality of negation. In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal—the protest against that which is. The modes in which man and things are made to appear, to sing and sound and speak, are modes of refuting, breaking, and recreating their factual existence. But these modes of negation pay tribute to the antagonistic society to which they are linked. Separated from the sphere of labor where society reproduces itself and its misery, the world of art which they create remains, with all its truth, a privilege and an illusion. In this form it continues, in spite of all democratization and popularization, through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The “high culture” in which this alienation is celebrated has its own rites and its own style. The salon, the concert, opera. theater are designed to create and invoke another dimension of reality. Their attendance requires festive-like preparation; they cut off and transcend everyday experience. Now this essential gap between the arts and the order of the day, kept open in the artistic alienation, is progressively closed by the advancing technological society. And with its closing, the Great Refusal is in turn refused; the “other dimension” is absorbed into the prevailing state of affairs. The works of alienation are themselves incorporated into this society and circulate as part and parcel of the equipment which adorns and psychoanalyzes the prevailing state of affairs.”

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 63-64

Kurien Kunnumpuram photo
Joseph Massad photo

“Zionism as a colonial movement is constituted in ideology and practice by a religio-racial epistemology through which it apprehends itself and the world around it. This religioracial grid informs and is informed by its colonial-settler venture. The colonial model remains the best model through which Zionism should be analyzed, but it is important also to analyze the racial dimension of Zionism in its current manifestation, which is often elided.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Massad, "The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle", Interventions, 2003, based on an earlier and shorter article entitled "On Zionism and Jewish supremacy", New Politics, 2002.
"The Ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle"

Johannes Kepler photo
Jack Vance photo
James Jeans photo
Northrop Frye photo
Germaine Greer photo
Laurent Clerc photo

“Every creature, every work of God, is admirably well made; but if any one appears imperfect in our eyes, it does not belong to us to criticise it. Perhaps that which we do not find right in its kind, turns to our advantage, without our being able to perceive it. Let us look at the state of the heavens, one while the sun shines, another time it does not appear; now the weather is fine; again it is unpleasant; one day is hot, another is cold; another time it is rainy, snowy or cloudy; every thing is variable and inconstant. Let us look at the surface of the earth: here the ground is flat; there it is hilly and mountainous; in other places it is sandy; in others it is barren; and elsewhere it is productive. Let us, in thought, go into an orchard or forest. What do we see? Trees high or low, large or small, upright or crooked, fruitful or unfruitful. Let us look at the birds of the air, and at the fishes of the sea, nothing resembles another thing. Let us look at the beasts. We see among the same kinds some of different forms, of different dimensions, domestic or wild, harmless or ferocious, useful or useless, pleasing or hideous. Some are bred for men's sakes; some for their own pleasures and amusements; some are of no use to us. There are faults in their organization as well as in that of men. Those who are acquainted with the veterinary art, know this well; but as for us who have not made a study of this science, we seem not to discover or remark these faults. Let us now come to ourselves. Our intellectual faculties as well as our corporeal organization have their imperfections. There are faculties both of the mind and heart, which education improve; there are others which it does not correct. I class in this number, idiotism, imbecility, dulness. But nothing can correct the infirmities of the bodily organization, such as deafness, blindness, lameness, palsy, crookedness, ugliness. The sight of a beautiful person does not make another so likewise, a blind person does not render another blind. Why then should a deaf person make others so also? Why are we Deaf and Dumb? Is it from the difference of our ears? But our ears are like yours; is it that there may be some infirmity? But they are as well organized as yours. Why then are we Deaf and Dumb? I do not know, as you do not know why there are infirmities in your bodies, nor why there are among the human kind, white, black, red and yellow men. The Deaf and Dumb are everywhere, in Asia, in Africa, as well as in Europe and America. They existed before you spoke of them and before you saw them.”

Laurent Clerc (1785–1869) French-American deaf educator

Statement of 1818, quoted in Through Deaf Eyes: A Photographic History of an American Community (2007) by Douglas C. Baynton, Jack R. Gannon, and Jean Lindquist Bergey

David Horowitz photo
Ray Comfort photo

“Every magnitude, every dimension, requires a new configuration.”

Fritz Wotruba (1907–1975) Austrian sculptor (23 April 1907, Vienna – 28 August 1975, Vienna)

Source: The Human Form: Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings, 1977, p. 10.

Henry Mintzberg photo
John Wallis photo
Lisa Randall photo
Ray Kurzweil photo
Kurien Kunnumpuram photo
Colin Wilson photo
Husayn ibn Ali photo

“Two signs of learned person are: acceptance of other people's criticism, and being knowledgeable about the angles and dimensions of rhetoric and debate.”

Husayn ibn Ali (626–680) The grandson of Muhammad and the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib

Ibn Shu’ba al-Harrani, Tuhaf al-'Uqul, p. 252
Regarding Wisdom

John R. Commons photo

“[Formal structures of formal organizations] never succeed in conquering the non-rational dimensions of organizational behavior.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Organization," 1948, p. 25

Deane Montgomery photo

“THEOREM: if G is a locally euclidean, connected, simply connected topological group of dimension n greater than one, then G contains a closed proper subgroup of positive dimension.”

Deane Montgomery (1909–1992) American mathematician

[A theorem on locally euclidean groups, Annals of Mathematics, 1947, 650–658, 10.2307/1969132]

Chris Patten photo
Rollo May photo
Piet Mondrian photo
Jane Roberts photo
Herbert Hoover photo
Salvador Dalí photo
Anne Rice photo

“I was so conflicted and disillusioned about organized religion that I couldn't write. … I think my writings will go on being the writings of a believer in Christ. I think I'll be less frustrated and freer to write about the full dimension of what that means. But I write metaphysical thrillers, and how this works out in fiction is always mysterious: characters confront dilemmas. The worldview of the novel is certainly optimistic and that of a believer. What character will say what, I don't know until I start writing. …. Because I had written Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, I had become a public Christian. I wanted my readers to know that I was stepping aside from organized religion and the names Christian and Christianity because I wanted to exonerate myself from the things organized religion was doing in the name of Jesus. Christians have lost credibility in America as people who know how to love. They have become associated with hatred, persecution, attempting to abolish the separation of church and state, and trying to pressure people to vote certain ways in elections. I wanted to make it clear that I did not in any way remain complicit with those things.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

"Q & A: Anne Rice on Following Christ Without Christianity" interview by Sarah Pulliam Bailey in Christianity Today (17 Augutst 2010) http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/article_print.html?id=89167

Sun Ra photo

“The threads of wyrd are a dimension of ourselves that we cannot grasp with words. We spin webs of words, yet wyrd slips through like the wind.”

Brian Bates (1944) British academic

The Way of the Wyrd : Tales of an Anglo-Saxon Sorcerer (1983)
Context: The threads of wyrd are a dimension of ourselves that we cannot grasp with words. We spin webs of words, yet wyrd slips through like the wind. The secrets of wyrd do not lie in our word-hoards, but are locked in the soul. We can only discern the shadows of reality with our words, whereas our souls are capable of encountering the realities of wyrd directly. This is why wyrd is accessible to the sorcerer: the sorcerer sees with his soul, not with eyes blinkered by the shape of words.
Do not live your life searching around for answers in your word-hoard. You will find only words to rationalize your experience. Allow yourself to open to wyrd and it will cleanse, renew, change, and develop your casket of reason. Your word-hoard should serve your experience, not the reverse.

Ernest Flagg photo

“Certain combinations of dimensions produce harmonious results, but since the time of the ancient Greeks no system of design, consistently base on that knowledge, has been formulated.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Source: Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922), Ch. II

Nelson Mandela photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Jessye Norman photo

“Herbert von Karajan always rolled out a magic carpet for us, the singers. With him, our musical work took on another dimension.”

Jessye Norman (1945–2019) American opera singer

Quoted in Hohn Rockwell (1989) " Herbert von Karajan Is Dead; Musical Perfectionist Was 81 http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/17/obituaries/herbert-von-karajan-is-dead-musical-perfectionist-was-81.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm" in New York Times, July 17, 1989

Alfred de Zayas photo
John Dewey photo
Herbert Marcuse photo

“Ascending modern rationalism, in its speculative as well as empirical form, shows a striking contrast between extreme critical radicalism in scientific and philosophic method on the one hand, and an uncritical quietism in the attitude toward established and functioning social institutions. Thus Descartes' ego cogitans was to leave the “great public bodies” untouched, and Hobbes held that “the present ought always to be preferred, maintained, and accounted best.” Kant agreed with Locke in justifying revolution if and when it has succeeded in organizing the whole and in preventing subversion. However, these accommodating concepts of Reason were always contradicted by the evident misery and injustice of the “great public bodies” and the effective, more or less conscious rebellion against them. Societal conditions existed which provoked and permitted real dissociation. from the established state of affairs; a private as well as political dimension was present in which dissociation could develop into effective opposition, testing its strength and the validity of its objectives. With the gradual closing of this dimension by the society, the self-limitation of thought assumes a larger significance. The interrelation between scientific-philosophical and societal processes, between theoretical and practical Reason, asserts itself "behind the back” of the scientists and philosophers. The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior; consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered illusory or meaningless. Historical transcendence appears as metaphysical transcendence, not acceptable to science and scientific thought. The operational and behavioral point of view, practiced as a “habit of thought” at large, becomes the view of the established universe of discourse and action, needs and aspirations. The “cunning of Reason” works, as it so often did, in the interest of the powers that be. The insistence on operational and behavioral concepts turns against the efforts to free thought and behavior from the given reality and for the suppressed alternatives.”

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 15-16

Willem de Sitter photo
Bryan Caplan photo
Richard Brautigan photo
David Shuster photo

“As for UFO's … I do believe there is a dimension that we don't understand. Not sure about little green martians, though.”

David Shuster (1967) American television journalist

http://twitter.com/DavidShuster [citation needed]
On Twitter

Adi Da Samraj photo
Jane Roberts photo
Antoni Tàpies photo
Simone de Beauvoir photo

“It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

Conclusion, p. 539
The Coming of Age (1970)

Elia M. Ramollah photo
Ray Comfort photo
Jean Metzinger photo
Herbert Marcuse photo