Quotes about distance

A collection of quotes on the topic of distance, other, time, timing.

Mark Twain quote: “Distance lends enchantment to the view.”

Quotes about distance

“One day I went alone to the river to enjoy myself as usual. When I was a short distance from the masonry, however, I was horrified to observe that the water had risen and was carrying me along swiftly.… The pressure against my chest was great and I was barely able to keep my head above the surface.… Slowly and gradually I became exhausted and unable to withstand the strain longer. Just as I was about to let go, to be dashed against the rocks below, I saw in a flash of light a familiar diagram illustrating the hydraulic principle that the pressure of a fluid in motion is proportionate to the area exposed and automatically I turned on my left side. As if by magic, the pressure was reduced.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

My Inventions (1919)

Light, Water

“A truly humble man is sensible of his natural distance from God; of his dependence on Him; of the insufficiency of his own power and wisdom; and that it is by God's power that he is upheld and provided for, and that he needs God's wisdom to lead and guide him, and His might to enable him to do what he ought to do for Him.”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Wisdom, God, Nature, Dependency

“Equal weights at equal distances are in equilibrium and equal weights at unequal distances are not in equilibrium but incline towards the weight which is at the greater distance.”

Archimedes book On the Equilibrium of Planes

Book 1, Postulate 1.
On the Equilibrium of Planes

“Love has a language that transcends all languages, all barriers and all distance.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

During his 2015 Mexico Cruade - "TB Joshua Gathers 200,000 In Mexico" http://www.nigerianeye.com/2015/05/tb-joshua-gathers-200000-in-mexico.html Nigerian Eye (May 14 2015)

Love

“When travel outside the city is desired, computer-guided vehicles for land, sea, air, space and beyond can transport passengers and freight. For rapid movement of passengers on land across via ducts, bridges, and tunnels, high-speed mag-lev trains span great distances and will efficiently replace most aircraft transportation.”

Jacque Fresco (1916–2017) American futurist and self-described social engineer

Designing the Future (2007)

Training, Travel, Sea, Speed

“She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

Beauty, Way

“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success”

Ian Fleming (1908–1964) English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer

Success, Motivational, Success

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

Alan Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Source: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), p. 460.
Source: Computing machinery and intelligence

“You said you're going far away," Tamaru said. "How far away are we talking about?"

"It's a distance that can't be measured."

"Like the distance that separates one person's heart from another's.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

Heart, Personality

“Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Universe

“Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

Source: Evidence: Poems

Thinking

“Faith is like radar that sees through the fog -- the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.”

Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer

Faith, Reality

“I am Bhole Baba (Simple Father). I am nobody and nothing. I am only like a mirror in which you can see yourself. I am like a fire. Don’t keep too far away or you will not get warmth. But don’t get too near or you may burn yourself. Learn the right distance. My name is Maha Prabhuji”

Haidakhan Babaji teacher in northern India

The Great God
About Himself
Source: Gaura Devi. (1990). Babaji’s Teachings. P.7.

God, Learning

“Being the source of goodness, God, even after our failures, calls us anew, not effacing entirely from our mind the knowledge of good, even if we have turned away from virtue through sin. This is what God, at present, also does for Adam in calling him although he has hidden himself, saying to him: 'Adam, where art thou?' Adam, in fact, had been placed there by God for the purpose of working and guarding Paradise; he had received this place from Him to be his own. Having distanced himself from there by disobedience, it is proper that he should hear from God: 'Where art thou?”

Didymus the Blind (313–398) Coptic church theologian

God, Art, Failure, Knowledge

“Love knows not distance; it hath no continent; its eyes are for the stars, its feet for the swords; it continueth, though an army lay waste the pasture; it comforteth when there are no medicines; it hath the relish of manna; and by it do men live in the desert.”

Gilbert Parker (1862–1932) Canadian novelist and British politician

"The White Omen"

Love, Men, Star

“That electrical energy can be economically transmitted without wires to any terrestrial distance, I have unmistakably established in numerous observations, experiments and measurements, qualitative and quantitative. These have demonstrated that is practicable to distribute power from a central plant in unlimited amounts, with a loss not exceeding a small fraction of one per cent, in the transmission, even to the greatest distance, twelve thousand miles — to the opposite end of the globe.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Loss

“Universities won't survive. The future is outside the traditional campus, outside the traditional classroom. Distance learning is coming on fast.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

I got my degree through E-mail http://www.forbes.com/forbes/1997/0616/5912084a.html, Forbes (June 16, 1997) 1990s and later

Learning, Universe, Future

“Two magnitudes whether commensurable or incommensurable, balance at distances reciprocally proportional to the magnitudes.”

Archimedes book On the Equilibrium of Planes

Book 1, Propositions 6 & 7, The Law of the Lever.
On the Equilibrium of Planes

“It was now the hour that turns back the longing of seafarers and melts their heart the day they have bidden dear friends farewell and pierces the new traveller with love if he hears in the distance the bell that seems to mourn the dying day.”

Dante Alighieri book Purgatorio

Canto VIII, lines 1–6 (tr. Sinclair).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Purgatorio

Love, Travel, Heart

“That’s what I wanted to do. You know, 2 hours. It’s like long-distance running or playing in a football game when you totally run out of steam and the moves you make after you run out of steam, because you’re totally unselfconscious, you’re not even thinking about the mechanics anymore. The moves you make then are incredible.”

Jeff Buckley (1966–1997) American singer, guitarist and songwriter

From Grace EPK (Electronic Press Kit)

Game, Thinking, Football

“Separation isn't time or distance
it's the bridge between us
finer than silk thread sharper than swords”

Nâzım Hikmet (1902–1963) Turkish poet

From Separation (6 June 1960)

Time

“Chemical analysis and synthesis go no farther than to the separation of particles one from another, and to their reunion. No new creation or destruction of matter is within the reach of chemical agency. We might as well attempt to introduce a new planet into the solar system, or to annihilate one already in existence, as to create or destroy a particle of hydrogen. All the changes we can produce, consist in separating particles that are in a state of cohesion or combination, and joining those that were previously at a distance.”

John Dalton book A New System of Chemical Philosophy

Source: A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), Ch. III. On Chemical Synthesis

Change

“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.”

George Orwell book Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language (1946)

People, World, Feeling, Light

“Science is never finished because the human mind only uses a small portion of its capacity, and man's exploration of his world is also limited. If we look at this tree outside whose roots search beneath the pavement for water, or a flower which sends its sweet smell to the pollinating bees, or even our own selves and the inner forces that drive us to act, we can see that we all dance to a mysterious tune, and the piper who plays this melody from an inscrutable distance—whatever name we give him—Creative Force, or God—escapes all book knowledge.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 14

God, Books, World, Search

“Life stretches between birth and death. Distance, just a breath”

Titon Rahmawan

#Life

Birth, Life, Death

“You have yet to understand, my friends, that the shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Source: Anthony De Mello : Writings (1999), p. 8
Context: A master was once unmoved by the complaints of his disciples that, though they listened with pleasure to his parables and stories, they were also frustrated for they longed for something deeper. To all their objections he would simply reply: "You have yet to understand, my friends, that the shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story."

Truth, Understanding

“Your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes, far in the distance.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

People, Solitude

“Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men. To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Sect. 38
Source: Twilight of the Idols (1888)

Life, Men, Freedom, Indifference

“Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Life

“I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.”

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

Source: The Stream of Life

Sadness

“I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.”

Hunter S. Thompson The Rum Diary

Source: The Rum Diary

“Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

Source: Poetry as Insurgent Art

“You must tell Lady Alanna that sometime. I'd do it from a distance.”

Tamora Pierce book Emperor Mage

Source: Emperor Mage

“No matter how far you are. No matter how long it takes him. Through Distance And Time I'll be waiting..”

Alicia Keys (1981) American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actress

Time, Waiting

“This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

“Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

“At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?”

Hanif Kureishi (1954) English playwright, screenwriter, novelist

Source: Intimacy: das Buch zum Film von Patrice Chéreau

People, Time

“History sometimes reproduces, at a distance of many years, the same combinations of circumstances that generate great achievements. But nothing ever repeats itself in exactly the same way.”

Valerio Massimo Manfredi (1943) Italian writer and archaeologist

Source: Alexander: Child of a Dream

Way, History

“Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world… enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Source: Speeches And Letters Of Abraham Lincoln, 1832 1865

World, Art, Communication, Time

“How is it possible to miss a woman whom you kept at a distance, so that when she was gone you would not miss her?”

Steve Martin book Shopgirl

Source: Shopgirl

“Distance lends enchantment to the view.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

“Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”

Thomas Hardy book The Return of the Native

Source: The Return of the Native

“Every solution to every problem is simple. It's the distance between the two where the mystery lies.”

Derek Landy Skulduggery Pleasant

Source: Skulduggery Pleasant

Problem

“It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Mountain

“Just look down the road and tell me if you can see either of them."
I see nobody on the road." said Alice.
I only wishhad such eyes,"the King remarked in a fretful tone. "To be able to see Nobody! And at such a distance too!”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

“Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Nausea

Source: Nausea

Heart

“Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Friendship, Missing You, Goodbye, For Friend

“Having wandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of a great cavern… Two contrary emotions arose in me: fear and desire--fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see whether there were any marvelous things in it.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Fear

“I ask how far away the eye can discern a non-luminous body, as, for instance, a mountain. It will be very plainly visible if the sun is behind it; and could be seen at a greater or less distance according to the sun's place in the sky.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IV Perspective of Disappearance

Mountain, Sun

“Perspective is nothing more than a rational demonstration applied to the consideration of how objects in front of the eye transmit their image to it, by means of a pyramid of lines. The Pyramid is the name I apply to the lines which, starting from the surface and edges of each object, converge from a distance and meet in a single point.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), II Linear Perspective

“Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world. Our hearing extends to a small distance. Our sight is impeded by intervening bodies and shadows. To know each other we must reach beyond the sphere of our sense perceptions. We must transmit our intelligence, travel, transport the materials and transfer the energies necessary for our existence. Following this thought we now realize, forcibly enough to dispense with argument, that of all other conquests of man, without exception, that which is most desirable, which would be most helpful in the establishment of universal peaceful relations is — the complete ANNIHILATION OF DISTANCE.
To achieve this wonder, electricity is the one and only means. Inestimable good has already been done by the use of this all powerful agent, the nature of which is still a mystery. Our astonishment at what has been accomplished would be uncontrollable were it not held in check by the expectation of greater miracles to come. That one, the greatest of all, can be viewed in three aspects: Dissemination of intelligence, transportation, and transmission of power.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

World, Peace, Travel, Intelligence

“Parallel lines have a common end point at an infinite distance.”

Girard Desargues (1591–1661) French mathematician and engineer

Brouillion project (1639) as quoted by Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter, Projective Geometry (1987)

“How far you are I just don't know
The distance I'm willing to go
I pick up a stone that I cast to the sky
Hoping for some kind of sign”

Norah Jones (1979) American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist

"Lonestar", Come Away with Me (2002)
Song lyrics

Hope

“We see from Lenard's table that a cathode ray can travel through air at atmospheric pressure a distance of about half a centimetre before the brightness of the phosphorescence falls to about half its original value. Now the mean free path of the molecules of air at this pressure is about 10-5 cm., and if a molecule of air were projected it would lose half its momentum in a space comparable with the mean free path. Even if we suppose that it is not the same molecule that is carried, the effect of the obliquity of the collisions would reduce the momentum to half in a short multiple of that path. Thus, from Lenard's experiments on the absorption of the rays outside the tube, it follows on the hypothesis that the cathode rays are charged particles moving with high velocities, that the size of the carriers must be small compared with the dimensions of ordinary atoms or molecules. The assumption of a state of matter more finely subdivided than the atom of an element is a somewhat startling one; but a hypothesis that would involve somewhat similar consequences—viz. that the so-called elements are compounds of some primordial element—has been put forward from time to time by various chemists.”

J. J. Thomson (1856–1940) British physicist

Royal Institution Lecture (April 30, 1897) as quoted by Edmund Taylor Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity from the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth Century http://books.google.com/books?id=CGJDAAAAIAAJ (1910). Quotes eat me

Travel, Time

“As I conclude I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents. Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.”

Wangari Maathai (1940–2011) Kenyan environmental and political activist

Nobel lecture http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/2004/maathai-lecture.html (10 December 2004)

Women, Children, World, Beauty

“Religion now had to have its compartment, almost its social place.
The frontier had ceased to exist. And the religions it had bred were beginning slowly to die. In the old days, when men, often of little education, had needed only to declare themselves ministers, people would have seen themselves reflected in the expounders of the Word. This quality of homespun would have made the religions appear creations of a community, personal and close and inviolable. Now a certain distance was needed.”

V.S. Naipaul book A Turn in the South

Source: A Turn in the South (1989), Ch. 6, p. 244

Men, People, Education, Religion

“The past was real. The present, all about me, was unreal, unnatural, repellent. I saw the big ships lying in the stream… the home of hardship and hopelessness; the boats passing to and fro; the cries of the sailors at the capstan or falls; the peopled beach; the large hide houses, with their gangs of men; and the Kanakas interspersed everywhere. All, all were gone! Not a vestige to mark where one hide house stood. The oven, too, was gone. I searched for its site, and found, where I thought it should be, a few broken bricks and bits of mortar. I alone was left of all, and how strangely was I here! What changes to me! Where were they all? Why should I care for them — poor Kanakas and sailors, the refuse of civilization, the outlaws and the beachcombers of the Pacific! Time and death seemed to transfigure them. Doubtless nearly all were dead; but how had they died, and where? In hospitals, in fever climes, in dens of vice, or falling from the mast, or dropping exhausted from the wreck "When for a moment, like a drop of rain/He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan/Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown." The lighthearted boys are now hardened middle-aged men, if the seas, rocks, fevers, and the deadlier enemies that beset a sailor's life on shore have spared them; and the then strong men have bowed themselves, and the earth or sea has covered them. How softening is the effect of time! It touches us through the affections. I almost feel as if I were lamenting the passing away of something loved and dear — the boats, the Kanakas, the hides, my old shipmates! Death, change, distance, lend them a character which makes them quite another thing.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Love, Life, Death, Men

“In fact, there is something puzzling about the Higgs mass we now do observe. It is generally known as the “hierarchy problem.” Since it is the Higgs mass that sets the scale for the masses of all other known elementary particles, one might guess that it should be similar to another mass that plays a fundamental role in physics, the so-called Planck mass, which is the fundamental unit of mass in the theory of gravitation. (It is the mass of hypothetical particles whose gravitational attraction for one another would be as strong as the electric force between two electrons separated by the same distance.) But the Planck mass is about a hundred thousand trillion times larger than the Higgs mass. So, although the Higgs particle is so heavy that a giant particle collider was needed to create it, we still have to ask, why is the Higgs mass so small?”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

"The Big Higgs Question" http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/07/09/big-higgs-question/, The New York Review of Books, 9 July 2012

Problem, Strong, Time

“Of several luminous bodies of equal size and brilliancy and at an equal distance, that will look the largest which is surrounded by the darkest background.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IV Perspective of Disappearance

“As all regions below are replenished with living creatures… so may the heavens above be replenished with beings whose nature we do not understand. He that shall well consider the strange and wonderful nature of life and the frame of the Animals, will think nothing beyond the possibility of nature, nothing too hard for the omnipotent power of God. And as the Planets remain in their orbs, so may any other bodies subsist at any distance from the earth, and much more may beings, who have sufficient power of self motion, move whether they will, and continue in any regions of the heavens whatever, there to enjoy the society of one another, and by their messengers or Angels to rule the earth and convers with the remotest regions. Thus may the whole heavens or any part thereof whatever be the habitation of the Blessed, and at the same time the earth be subject to their dominion. And to have thus the liberty and dominion of the whole heavens and the choice of the happiest places for abode seems a greater happiness than to be confined to any one place whatever.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

As quoted by Frank Edward Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton (1977)

Life, God, Angels, Understanding

“At present, many of the ablest minds are trying to devise expedients for preventing a repetition of the awful conflict which is only theoretically ended and the duration and main issues of which I have correctly predicted in an article printed in the Sun of December 20, 1914. The proposed League is not a remedy but, on the contrary, in the opinion of a number of competent men, may bring about results just the opposite. It is particularly regrettable that a punitive policy was adopted in framing the terms of peace, because a few years hence, it will be possible for nations to fight without armies, ships or guns, by weapons far more terrible, to the destructive action and range of which there is virtually no limit. Any city, at a distance, whatsoever, from the enemy, can be destroyed by him and no power on earth can stop him from doing so.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

My Inventions (1919)

Men, Peace, Sun, Fight

“Bullialdus wrote that all force respecting the Sun as its center & depending on matter must be reciprocally in a duplicate ratio of the distance from the center.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Letter to Edmund Halley (June 20, 1686) quoted in I. Bernard Cohen and George E. Smith, ed.s, The Cambridge Companion to Newton (2002) p. 204

Sun, Dependency

“Russia will in due time become a power almost as great as the old Roman Empire. She can become mistress of all Asia, except British India, whenever she chooses to take it; and when enlightened arrangements shall have made her revenue proportioned to her territory, and railways shall have abridged distances her command of men will become enormous, her pecuniary means gigantic, and her power of transporting armies over great distances most formidable. Germany ought to be strong in order to resist Russian aggression, and a strong Prussia is essential to German strength.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Letter to Lord John Russell (13 September 1865), quoted in E. Ashley (ed.), The Life of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston 1846-1865 (London, 1876), pp. 270-1
1860s

Men, Strong, Time

“The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Minima Moralia

Nun gilt für die kürzeste Verbindung zwischen zwei Personen die Gerade, so als ob sie Punkte wären.
E. Jephcott, trans. (1974), § 20
Minima Moralia (1951)

People

“To conquer by sheer force is becoming harder and harder every day. Defensive is getting continuously the advantage of offensive, as we progress in the satanic science of destruction. The new art of controlling electrically the movements and operations of individualized automata at a distance without wires, will soon enable any country to render its coasts impregnable against all naval attacks.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Art, Science, Country

“There’s a magic in the distance, where the sea-line meets the sky.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Forty Singing Seamen
Poems (1906)

Sea

“Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunny one,
at the end of the path which I've only just begun.
So we are grasped, by that which we could not grasp,
at such great distance, so fully manifest—and it changes us, even when we do not reach it,
into something that, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a sign appears, echoing our own sign…
But what we sense is the falling winds.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Schon ist mein Blick am Hügel, dem besonnten,
dem Wege, den ich kaum begann, voran.
So fasst uns das, was wir nicht fassen konnten,
voller Erscheinung, aus der Ferne an—und wandelt uns, auch wenn wirs nicht erreichen,
in jenes, das wir, kaum es ahnend, sind;
ein Zeichen weht, erwidernd unserm Zeichen...
Wir aber spüren nur den Gegenwind.
Spaziergang (A Walk) (March 1924)
Alternate translation:
My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance—and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave . . .
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke as translated by Robert Bly (1981)

Sense, Appearance, Change

“The factor of distance may also stand for an index of information about export markets.”

Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) Dutch economist

Source: Shaping the world economy, 1962, p. 263

“There is one alternative to dark matter, and that is the assumption that Newton's laws don't hold over distances as great as galaxies. But we know that Newton's laws hold over a very large domain. And virtually one hundred percent of the physics and astronomy community believes that there is matter in the universe that does not radiate.”

Vera Rubin (1928–2016) American astronomer

As quoted in [Astronomer Vera Rubin—The Doyenne of Dark Matter, Discover Magazine, http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/breakdialogue] (1 June 2002)

Law, Communication, Universe

“If we suppose the distance of the fixed stars from the sun to be so great that the diameter of the earth's orbit viewed from them would not subtend a sensible angle, or which amounts to the same, that their annual parallax is quite insensible; it will then follow that a line drawn from the earth in any part of its orbit to a fixed star, will always, as to sense, make the same angle with the plane of the ecliptic, and the place of the star, as seen from the earth, would be the same as seen from the sun placed in the focus of the ellipsis described by the earth in its annual revolution, which place may therefore be called its true or real place.
But if we further suppose that the velocity of the earth in its orbit bears any sensible proportion to the velocity with which light is propagated, it will thence follow that the fixed stars (though removed too far off to be subject to a parallax on account of distance) will nevertheless be liable to an aberration, or a kind of parallax, on account of the relative velocity between light and the earth in its annual motion.
For if we conceive, as before, the true place of any star to be that in which it would appear viewed from the sun, the visible place to a spectator moving along with the earth, will be always different from its true, the star perpetually appearing out of its true place more or less, according as the velocity of the earth in its orbit is greater or less; so that when the earth is in its perihelion, the star will appear farthest distant from its true place, and nearest to it when the earth is in its aphelion; and the apparent distance in the former case will be to that in the latter in the reciprocal proportion of the distances of the earth in its perihelion and its aphelion. When the earth is in any other part of its orbit, its velocity being always in the reciprocal proportion of the perpendicular let fall from the sun to the tangent of the ellipse at that point where the earth is, or in the direct proportion of the perpendicular let fall upon the same tangent from the other focus, it thence follows that the apparent distance of a star from its true place, will be always as the perpendicular let fall from the upper focus upon the tangent of the ellipse. And hence it will be found likewise, that (supposing a plane passing through the star parallel to the earth's orbit) the locus or visible place of the star on that plane will always be in the circumference of a circle, its true place being in that diameter of it which is parallel to the shorter axis of the earth's orbit, in a point that divides that diameter into two parts, bearing the same proportion to each other, as the greatest and least distances of the earth from the sun.”

James Bradley (1693–1762) English astronomer; Astronomer Royal

Miscellaneous Works and Correspondence (1832), Demonstration of the Rules relating to the Apparent Motion of the Fixed Stars upon account of the Motion of Light.

Star, Sense, Light, Distant

“Revealing great, unusual, and remarkable spectacles, opening these to the consideration of every man, and especially of philosophers and astronomers; as observed by Galileo Galilei, Gentleman of Florence, Professor of Mathematics in the University of Padua, with the aid of a spyglass lately invented by him, in the surface of the Moon, in innumerable fixed stars, in nebulae, and above all in four planets swiftly revolving about Jupiter at differing distances and periods, and known to no one before the author recently perceived them and decided they should be named the Medicean Stars”

Galileo Galilei book Sidereus Nuncius

Translation by Stillman Drake in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957)
Sidereus Nuncius (Venice, 1609)

Star, Mathematics, Universe

“We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Speech "The Tasks of Economic Executives" (4 February 1931) http://marx2mao.com/Stalin/TEE31.html Stalin said this in 1931, at the beginning of the rapid industrialization campaign. Ten years later, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews

Country

“This independence is glorified as "academic freedom," … except that in the background, a discreet distance away, stands the state watching with a certain supervisory look on its face, making sure to remind everybody from time to time that it is the aim, the purpose, the essence of this whole strange process.”

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

Diese doppelte Selbständigkeit preist man mit Hochgefühl als ›akademische Freiheit‹: ... nur daß hinter beiden Gruppen in bescheidener Entfernung der Staat mit einer gewissen gespannten Aufsehermiene steht, um von Zeit zu Zeit daran zu erinnern, daß er Zweck, Ziel und Inbegriff der sonderbaren Sprech- und Hörprozedur sei.
Anti-Education (1872)

Freedom, Time

“Within a few years a simple and inexpensive device, readily carried about, will enable one to receive on land or sea the principal news, to hear a speech, a lecture, a song or play of a musical instrument, conveyed from any other region of the globe. The invention will also meet the crying need for cheap transmission to great distances, more especially over the oceans. The small working capacity of the cables and the excessive cost of messages are now fatal impediments in the dissemination of intelligence which can only be removed by transmission without wires.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Music, Intelligence, Cry, Sea

“And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs, […] and we thought of the space the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields; […] of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 was uttering those words: "… ah, what noodles, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe, […] and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!," a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0s, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss.”

Italo Calvino book Cosmicomics

Pages 46-47, "All at One Point".
Cosmicomics (1965)

Love, World, Mountain, Star

“The ideal solution of the problem of transportation will be arrived at only when the complete annihilation of distance in the transmission of power in large amounts shall have become a commercial reality. That day we shall invade the domain of the bird. When the vexing problem of aerial navigation, which has defied his attempts for ages, is solved, man will advance with giant strides.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Age, Problem, Bird, Reality

“But we are here today because we know we cannot be complacent. For history travels not only forwards; history can travel backwards, history can travel sideways. And securing the gains this country has made requires the vigilance of its citizens. Our rights, our freedoms -- they are not given. They must be won. They must be nurtured through struggle and discipline, and persistence and faith. And one concern I have sometimes during these moments, the celebration of the signing of the Civil Rights Act, the March on Washington -- from a distance, sometimes these commemorations seem inevitable, they seem easy. All the pain and difficulty and struggle and doubt -- all that is rubbed away. And we look at ourselves and we say, oh, things are just too different now; we couldn’t possibly do what was done then -- these giants, what they accomplished. And yet, they were men and women, too. It wasn’t easy then. It wasn’t certain then. Still, the story of America is a story of progress. However slow, however incomplete, however harshly challenged at each point on our journey, however flawed our leaders, however many times we have to take a quarter of a loaf or half a loaf -- the story of America is a story of progress. And that’s true because of men like President Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks by the President at LBJ Presidential Library Civil Rights Summit at Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas on April 10, 2014. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/04/10/remarks-president-lbj-presidential-library-civil-rights-summit 2014

Women, Men, Pain, Faith

“It was a very spasmodic courtship, conducted mainly at long distance with a great clanking of coins in dozens of phone booths.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–1994) public figure, First Lady to 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy

On her romance with John F. Kennedy quoted inThe Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987) by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

“Do not Bodies act upon Light at a distance, and by their action bend its Rays; and is not this action (caeteris paribus) [all else being equal] strongest at the least distance?”

Isaac Newton book Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light

Query 1
Opticks (1704)

Light

“Since the [Cepheid] variables are probably at nearly the same distance from the Earth, their periods are apparently associated with their actual emission of light, as determined by their mass, density, and surface brightness.”

Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868–1921) astronomer

Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1912HarCi.173....1L (1912)

Light

“We go back home. We wait and then have dinner. We live these few hours. And we see ourselves alone in the house, facing each other, as never we saw ourselves, and we do not know what to do! It is a real drama of vacancy which is breaking loose. We are living together; our movements are in harmony, they touch and mingle. But all of it is empty. We do not long for each other, we can no longer expect each other, we have no dreams, we are not happy. It is a sort of imitation of life by phantoms, by beings who, in the distance are beings, but close by — so close — are phantoms!”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XIX - Ghosts

Life, Dreams, Home, Waiting

“These same institutions produce quite different effects while they are still being fought for; then they really promote freedom in a powerful way. On closer inspection it is war that produces these effects, the war for liberal institutions, which, as a war, permits illiberal instincts to continue. And war educates for freedom. For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Twilight of the Idols

Twilight of the Idols (1888)

Life, War, Education, Way

“The Earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as it is deep, and only the upper part is inhabited. But this Earth is isolated in space, and the sky is a complete sphere in the center of which is located, unsupported, our cylinder, the Earth, situated at an equal distance from all the points of the sky.”

Anaximander (-610–-547 BC) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher

As quoted in "Science Attests the Accuracy of the Bible" in The Watchtower (1 October 1980)

Time, Parting

“Oh, yes … I'm really frightfully human and love all mankind, and all that sort of thing. Mankind is truly amusing, when kept at the proper distance. And common men, if well-behaved, are really quite useful. One is a cynick only when one thinks. At such times the herd seems a bit disgusting because each member of it is always trying to hurt somebody else, or gloating because somebody else is hurt. Inflicting pain seems to be the chief sport of persons whose tastes and interests run to ordinary events and direct pleasures and rewards of life—the animalistic or (if one may use a term so polluted with homoletick associations) worldly people of our absurd civilisation. ……. I may be human, all right, but not quite human enough to be glad at the misfortune of anybody. I am rather sorry (not outwardly but genuinely so) when disaster befalls a person—sorry because it gives the herd so much pleasure. … The natural hatefulness and loathsomeness of the human beast may be overcome only in a few specimens of fine heredity and breeding, by a transference of interests to abstract spheres and a consequent sublimation of the universal sadistic fury. All that is good in man is artificial; and even that good is very slight and unstable, since nine out of ten non-primitive people proceed at once to capitalise their asceticism and vent their sadism by a Victorian brutality and scorn towards all those who do not emulate their pose. Puritans are probably more contemptible than primitive beasts, though neither class deserves much respect.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to James F. Morton (8 March 1923), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 211-212
Non-Fiction, Letters

Love, Life, Men, Pain

“Just as things in a picture, when viewed from a distance, appear to be all in one and the same condition and alike.”

Plato book Parmenides

165c
Parmenides

Appearance

“When the great truth accidentally revealed and experimentally confirmed is fully recognized, that this planet, with all its appalling immensity, is to electric currents virtually no more than a small metal ball and that by this fact many possibilities, each baffling imagination and of incalculable consequence, are rendered absolutely sure of accomplishment; when the first plant is inaugurated and it is shown that a telegraphic message, almost as secret and non-interferable as a thought, can be transmitted to any terrestrial distance, the sound of the human voice, with all its intonations and inflections, faithfully and instantly reproduced at any other point of the globe, the energy of a waterfall made available for supplying light, heat or motive power, anywhere — on sea, or land, or high in the air — humanity will be like an ant heap stirred up with a stick: See the excitement coming!”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

"The Transmission of Electric Energy Without Wires" in Electrical World and Engineer (5 March 1904)

Truth, Secret, Imagination, Motivation

“With eyes up-raised, as one inspired,
Pale Melancholy sate retired,
And from her wild sequestered seat,
In notes by distance made more sweet,
Poured thro' the mellow horn her pensive soul.”

William Collins (1721–1759) English poet, born 1721

Source: The Passions, an Ode for Music (1747), Line 57. Compare: "Sweetest melodies / Are those that are by distance made more sweet", William Wordsworth, Personal Talk, stanza 2.

Soul

“The East has always been very fortunate in being supported with a very strong foundation of Buddha Dharma. … The downside is that the changes of the modern world, and the East trying to keep up with the economic development—as we call call it—process often has distanced laymen from the Buddhist teachings. Livelihood and survival as well as the increase of material belongings has become so very strong, that oftentimes we find the seriousness with which Dharma is practiced is limited to monastic institutions.”

Khandro Rinpoche (1967) Buddhist lama

"Nagarjuna’s Letter to a Friend" (2008) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQX4FYitEo4&feature=youtu.be&t=206

World, Support, Strong, Change

“To swim in the open sky. To achieve the tenderness of clouds. To suspend these masses in the distance, very far away in the grey mist, make the blue explode. I feel all this coming, dawning in my intentions. What joy and what torment! If the bottom were still, perhaps I would never reach these depths. Did they do better in the past? Did the Dutch achieve the poetry of clouds I seek? That tenderness of the sky which even extends to admiration, to worship: it is no exaggeration.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Diary-note of Boudin, 3 December, 1856; as cited in the description of his painting 'Sky, Setting Sun, Bushes in Foreground' http://www.muma-lehavre.fr/en/collections/artworks-in-context/eugene-boudin/boudin-skies, by the Muma-museum, Le Havre A quote from Boudin's personal diary sheds remarkable light on a small group of his sky studies 1850s - 1870s

Feeling, Past, Joy

“The variety of colour in objects cannot be discerned at a great distance, excepting in those parts which are directly lighted up by the solar rays.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), VI Perspective of Colour and Aerial Perspective

Light, Parting

“It seems to me, that if the matter of our sun and planets and all the matter of the universe, were evenly scattered throughout all the heavens, and every particle had an innate gravity towards all the rest, and the whole of space throughout which this matter was scattered was but finite, the matter on [toward] the outside of this space would, by its gravity, tend towards all the matter on the inside, and, by consequence, fall down into the middle of the whole space, and there compose one great spherical mass. But if the matter was evenly disposed throughout an infinite space it could never convene into one mass; but some of it would convene into one mass and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of great masses, scattered at great distances from one another throughout all that infinite space.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Four Letters to Bentley (1692) first letter

Universe, Sun

“Modern scientists attempt excursions to other planets, but they have no information of how many different types of oceans and seas there are within the universe. According to their experience, the Moon is full of dust, but this does not explain how it gives us soothing rays from a distance of millions of miles. As far as we are concerned, we follow the authority of Vyasadeva and Sukadeva Gosvami, who have described the universal situation according to the Vedic literature. These authorities differ from modern scientists who conclude from their imperfect sensual experience that only this planet is inhabited by living beings whereas the other planets are all vacant or full of dust.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Srimad Bhagavatam, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1999. Canto 7, Chapter 4, verse 15, purport. Vedabase http://www.vedabase.com/en/sb/7/4/15 Quotes from Books: Loving God, Quotes from Books: Regression of Science

Literature, Universe, Sea

“… spread on a plane the surface of a sphere in such a way that the positions of all places shall correspond on all sides with each other both in so far as true direction and distance are concerned and as concerns true longitudes and latitudes.”

Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) cartographer, philosopher and mathematician

Legend on 1569 map

Way

“"What is this romance?" she mused.
"Ah, that’s the question. I’ve never come across a definition that satisfied me, though there are some very good ones"—he glanced in the direction of his books.
"It’s not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it’s ignorance," she hazarded.
"Some authorities say it’s a question of distance—romance in literature, that is—"
"Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be—" she hesitated.”

Virginia Woolf book Night and Day

Night and Day (1919)

People, Books, Art, Literature

“We begin to think cosmically. Our sympathetic feelers reach out into the dim distance. The bacteria of the "Weltschmerz," are upon us. So far, however, universal harmony has been attained only in a single sphere of international relationship. That is the postal service. Its mechanism is working satisfactorily, but — how remote are we still from that scrupulous respect of the sanctity of the mail bag! And how much farther again is the next milestone on the road to peace — an international judicial service equally reliable as the postal!”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

A Means for Furthering Peace (1905)

Peace, Thinking, Universe

“A factor that is almost indispensable to this kind of behavior [serial killing] is the mobility of contemporary American life. Living in large centers of population, and living with lots of people, you can get used to dealing with strangers. It's the anonymity factor, and it has a twofold effect. First of all if you're among strangers you're less likely to remember them, or care what they're doing or what they should, or should not, be doing. If they should or shouldn't be there. Secondly, you're conditioned almost not to be afraid of strangers. Mobility is very important here. As we've seen…the individual's [himself in third person] modus operandi was moving large distances in an attempt to camouflage what he was doing. Moving these distances, he was able to take advantage of the anonymity factor.”

Ted Bundy (1946–1989) American serial killer

Quoted in Michaud, Stephen; Aynesworth, Hugh (1999) The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy (Paperback; revised ed.). Irving, Texas: Authorlink Press. pg. 326

Life, People, Behavior, Personality

“We do not speak. We have gone down along the side of the river — slowly, as if we were climbing — towards the stone seat of the wall. The distances have altered. This seat, for instance, we meet it sooner than we thought we should, like some one in the dark; but it is the seat all right. The rose-tree which grew above it has withered away and become a crown of thorns.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XIX - Ghosts

Tree