Quotes about dot (109 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Star , Painting , Night , Forgetting

“Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 8, Supplemental image at randi.org http://www.randi.org/images/122801-BlueDot.jpg

Love , Life , World , Religion

“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lolita

Source: Lolita

School

“Knowledge is the key that unlocks all the doors. You can be green-skinned with yellow polka dots and come from Mars, but if you have knowledge that people need, instead of beating you, they'll beat a path to your door.”

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

Source: Think Big (1996), p. 216
Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

People , Knowledge

“Airbags are a lot of baloney, no matter what Allstate says or no matter what the DOT says.”

Henry Ford II (1917–1987) American automotive industry executive; longtime president, chairman, and CEO of the Ford Motor Company; me…

An Unreasonable Man (2006 documentary film, Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan; DVD special features)

“Eyes watching always
Shadows in shadows they wait
A black feather falls

First accepted, loved
Then betrayed-spit in the face
Vengeance sweet like dots.”

Kristin Cast book Hunted

Source: Hunted

Love , Waiting

“A line is a dot that went for a walk.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

“All I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three I have learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at one hundred I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am a hundred and ten, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive. I beg those who live as long as I to see if I do not keep my word. Written at the age of seventy five by me, once Hokusai, today Gwakyo Rojin, the old man mad about drawing.”

Hokusai (1760–1849) Japanese artist

On one of his pseudonom, Gyakyo Rojin. He may have said the above in his late life definitely, since he began to use the name Gwakyo Rojin in 1843.
Attributed

Age , Nature , Bird , Fish

“"Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”

Rose Macaulay book The Towers of Trebizond

The Towers of Trebizond (1956), opening words

Animals

“Quite near, one face is looking sadly at me, as it lolls to one side. It is coming out of the bottom of the heap, as a wild animal might. Its hair falls back like nails. The nose is a triangular hole and a little of the whiteness of human marble dots it. There are no lips left, and the two rows of teeth show up like lettering. The cheeks are sprinkled with moldy traces of beard. This body is only mud and stones. This face, in front of my own, is only a consummate mirror.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XV - An Apparition

Animals

“In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded. They divide their time between labour designed to postpone the moment of dissolution for themselves and frantic struggles to hasten it for others of their kind.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Dreams and Facts https://users.drew.edu/jlenz/br-dreams.html (1919)
1910s

World , Way , Water , Time

“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 8, Supplemental image at randi.org http://www.randi.org/images/122801-BlueDot.jpg
Context: Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

World , Home , Distant

“Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 8, Supplemental image at randi.org http://www.randi.org/images/122801-BlueDot.jpg
Context: Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Love , Home

“I really agree that Yog-Sothoth is a basically immature conception, & unfitted for really serious literature. The fact is, I have never approached serious literature yet. But I consider the use of actual folk-myths as even more childish than the use of new artificial myths, since in the former one is forced to retain many blatant peurilities & contradictions of experienced which could be subtilised or smoothed over if the supernaturalism were modelled to order for the given case. The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothothery, I think, is in symbolic or associative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given an embodiment & crystallisation... But there is another phase of cosmic phantasy (which may or may not include frank Yog-Sothothery) whose foundations appear to me as better grounded than those of ordinary oneiroscopy; personal limitations regarding the sense of outsideness. I refer to the aesthetic crystallisation of that burning & inextinguishable feeling of mixed wonder & oppression which the sensitive imagination experiences upon scaling itself & its restrictions against the vast & provocative abyss of the unknown. This has always been the chief emotion in my psychology; & whilst it obviously figures less in the psychology of the majority, it is clearly a well-defined & permanent factor from which very few sensitive persons are wholly free.... Reason as we may, we cannot destroy a normal perception of the highly limited & fragmentary nature of our visible world of perception & experience as scaled against the outside abyss of unthinkable galaxies & unplumbed dimensions—an abyss wherein our solar system is the merest dot... The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & measurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt—as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?”

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

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 293
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Time , Imagination , Personality , Dreams

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people... Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Interviewed with Wired: Gary Wolf. Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html (February 1996)
1990s

Problem , People , Feeling , Understanding

“Our home, pale blue dot in the vastness of universe's untouched beauty, a tiny spherical world, afloat in a immensity of space and time. Here for a moment, and then we're leaving for the eternity. In the school of mortality we learn to acrobat over the abyss.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

From the book "Universal consciousness"

School , Home , Time , Beauty

“The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking spaces.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

For Team , Business , Graduation , Success

“Life is a million different dots making one gigantic picture. And maybe the big picture is nice, maybe it's amazing, but if you're standing with your face pressed up against a bunch of black dots, it's really hard to tell.”

Rebecca Stead book Liar & Spy

Source: Liar & Spy

Life

“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Travels in Alaska http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/travels_in_alaska/ (1915), chapter 1: Puget Sound and British Columbia
1910s

Beauty , Star , Universe , Appearance

“Phryne was getting out of the car. Dot closed her eyes. Miss Fisher was about to happen to someone again.”

Kerry Greenwood (1954) Australian crime writer

Source: Dead Man's Chest

Cars

“Resorting to connecting the dots this morning because it was a long night & he needs to do something really simple to get started again.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Traveling Light: Stories & Drawings for a Quiet Mind

Night

“.. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the 'Momentary' masters of a 'Fraction' of a 'Dot”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Thinking

“I think we're all pretty crazy on this bus. I'm not sure I know anyone who's got all the dots on his or her dice.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year

Thinking

“Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“From now on I’ll connect the dots my own way.”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Way

“She fell asleep, and it was a sleep as thin as the night clouds, dotted with dreams that came and went like the stars.”

Lois Lowry book Number the Stars

Source: Number the Stars

Dreams , Star , Sleep , Night

“Who are they to give stars or dots? They're Wemmicks just like you."
Eli to Punchinello (p. 25)”

Max Lucado (1955) American clergyman and writer

Source: You Are Special

Star

“Stefan: "Indian with a dot, not a feather.”

Patricia Briggs book Bone Crossed

Source: Bone Crossed

“No moon, sun, diamond, hands —
fingertip, dot, ray, gauze, sea.
pine green, pink glass, eye,
mine, eraser, mud, mother, I am coming.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Source: The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait

Sun , Sea

“If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot and then I would erase it.”

Elizabeth Berg (1948) American novelist

Source: Joy School

Drawing

“My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots.”

David Levithan Boy Meets Boy

Source: Boy Meets Boy

“Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Fish

“… to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Dreams , Star

“In so far as we are individuals, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of this universe, a single dot in the immense network of forces and influences, cosmic, ethnic, historic, whose laws we obey. We are subject to the determination of the physical world. But each man is also a person, he is not subject to the stars and atoms; for he subsists entirely with the very subsistence of his spiritual soul, and the latter is in him a principle of creative unity, of independence and of freedom.”

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher

Scholasticism and Politics (1940)

World , Law , Soul , Star

“I haf von funny leedle poy
Vot comes schust to mine knee;
Der queerest schap, der createst rogue,
As ever you dit see.
He runs und schumps and schmashes dings
In all barts off der house:
But vot off dot? He vas mine son,
Mine leedle Yawcob Strauss.”

Charles Follen Adams (1842–1918) American poet

"Yawcob Strauss", in Yawcob Strauss, and Other Poems (1876), p. 11.

Housing

“Yet on some level we do know the truth. We know that meat production is a messy business, but we choose not to know just how messy it is. We know that meat comes from an animal, but we choose not to connect the dots. And often, we eat animals and choose not to know we're even making a choice. Violent ideologies are structured so that it is not only possible, but inevitable, that we are aware of an unpleasant truth on one level while being oblivious to it on another. Common to all violent ideologies is this phenomenon of knowing without knowing.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

And it is the essence of carnism.
Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), p. 71

Truth , Business , Animals

“Bracquemond tells me that he looked attentively at my works at our exhibition. Far from objecting to them, as I expected, he said they were compactly drawn, and modeled, but he is shocked by the dots; he enjoined me to stick to divisionism but not to use the dot. - I said nothing to him of our experiments. He told me that of all the impressionist painters he liked my work best; this was not the first time he had said this; to each one his own taste. He does completely accept my view that the old disorderly method of execution has become impossible.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Camille Pissarro, in a letter, Eragny, 23 January 1887, to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 97
1880's

Time

“I will have to leave for Paris as soon as you return. I did two drawings [black on paper] with pen and in little dots - a 'Little Market' and a 'St. Martin (Pig dealers)'. It would be a good thing if I could sell them to some newspaper, that would bring us a few pennies… I still don't know what I am going to do, for Heymann seems completely indifferent. He probably knows my position and naturally is waiting for me to reduce my prices, just as Durand did last time… If we could place these we could get a few cents while waiting for this terrible month of January to pass… These drawings matted look very well.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Pissarro, in a letter, Paris, 5 December 1886, to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 86
1880's

Nature , Time , Waiting , Drawing

“It is conceivable that AI will be able to understand all the news and investigative reports in all languages from both traditional and social media, connect the dots, predict imminent dangers, and identify long-term concerns.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Understanding

“The trends that produced Schumann’s early piano works started out not so much from Weber’s refined brilliance as from Schubert’s more intimate and deeply soul-searching idiom. His creative imagination took him well beyond the harmonic sequences known until his time. He looked at the fugues and canons of earlier composers and discovered in them a Romantic principle. In the interweaving of the voices, the essence of counterpoint found its parallel in the mysterious relationships between the human psyche and exterior phenomena, which Schumann felt impelled to express. Schubert’s broad melodic lyricism has often been contrasted with Schumann’s terse, often quickly repeated motifs, and by comparison Schumann is often erroneously seen as short-winded. Yet it is precisely with these short melodic formulae that he shone his searchlight into the previously unplumbed depths of the human psyche. With them, in a complex canonic web, he wove a dense tissue of sound capable of taking in and reflecting back all the poetical character present. His actual melodies rarely have an arioso form; his harmonic system combines subtle chromatic progressions, suspensions, a rapid alternation of minor and major, and point d’orgue. The shape of Schumann’s scores is characterized by contrapuntal lines, and can at first seem opaque or confused. His music is frequently marked by martial dotted rhythms or dance-like triple time signatures. He loves to veil accented beats of the bar by teasingly intertwining two simultaneous voices in independent motion. This highly inde-pendent instrumental style is perfectly attuned to his own particular compositional idiom. After a period in which the piano had indulged in sensuous beauty of sound and brilliant coloration, in Schumann it again became a tool for conveying poetic monologues in musical terms.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings about Chopin and Schumann

Love , Beauty , Music , Color

“Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

2000s, Address at Stanford University (2005)

Life , Confidence , Future , Heart

“I knew what a circle could do. Both eyes focus on it. It stamps itself out, like a dot. This, in turn, causes one's vision to spread, as in a mandala in Tantric art.”

Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

Kenneth Noland, p. 8
Conversation with Karen Wilkin' (1986-1988)

Art

“Too many dots,” Miller said. “Not enough lines.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 10 (p. 109)

“Maybe you don’t have that proof,” criminal defense attorney Jay Leiderman told the Daily Dot. Maybe the proof isn’t as good as you thought it was.”

Jay Leiderman (1971) lawyer

As stated in, Ross Ulbricht and the Mystery of the Disappearing Silk Road Murder Charges. http://jayleiderman.com/blog/jay-leiderman-quoted-the-mystery-of-the-disappearing-silk-road-murder-charges/

“He [Richter's art-mate, the German painter Sigmar Polke ] was very different, he was not cool... He had irony. He was very funny. The things we did together [around 1963 – 1970] were a kind of craziness... We thought everything was so stupid and we refused to participate. That was the basis of our understanding.... he was able to paint those little dots in his raster paintings by hand with such a patience while he was living with his two children and his wife in a small subsidized apartment.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), pp. 45-46, note 43

Children , Stupidity , Art , Understanding

“Pissarro wants to achieve delicacy by means of adjustments of nearly like tones; he keeps from juxtaposing two distant tones and does without the vibrant note which such contrast gives, but strives on the contrary to diminish the distance between two tints by introducing into each one of them intermediate elements which he calls 'passage'. But the neo-impressionist technique is based precisely on this type of contrast, for which he feels no need, and on the violent purity of tints which hurts his eye. He has kept of divisionism only the technique, the little dot, whose raison d'etre is exactly that it enables the transcription of this contrast and the conservation of this purity. So it is easy to understand why he [Pissarro] gave up this means, insufficient as it is by itself.”

Paul Signac (1863–1935) French painter

As quoted by John Rewald, in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, pp. 135
Signac, in his book De Delacroix au Neo-impressionnisme, tried to explain in this way Camille Pissarro's desertion from Neo-Impressionism around 1890
From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, 1899

Feeling , Understanding , Distant , Hurt

“Oh, who would choose to be a traveler? --
That anxious railway-guide unraveler
Who spends his nights in berths and bunks,
His days in chaperoning trunks;
Who stands in line at gates and wickets
To spend his means on costly tickets
To Irkutsk, Liverpool and Yap
And other dots upon the map.”

Arthur Guiterman (1871–1943) United States writer

The Traveler http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3077.html

Travel , Night

“I don't know what to write Feneon about the theory of 'passages'. I will write him what seems to me to be the truth of the matter, that I am at this moment looking for some substitute for the dot [which was the 'heart of [w:Neo-Impressionism|Neo-Impressionist]] painting]; so far I have not found what I want, the actual execution does not seem to me to be rapid enough and does not follow sensation with enough inevitability, but it would be best not to speak of this. The fact is I would be hard put to express my meaning clearly, although I am completely aware of what I lack.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Camille Pissarro, in a letter, Paris, 20 February 1889, to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 134-135
Rewald: 'This data was doubtless for an article in preparation. While the question of the 'passage', which was going to separate Camille Pissarro from pointillism and thus from Divisionism, was then the main preoccupation of the artist, Pissarro was still unable to express himself with precision on it.'
1880's

Truth , Heart , Painting

“Dots are just one example of an element in Lascaux art, and in all cave art… This is a profusion of nonrepresentational, geometric patterns. In addition to dots, there are grids and chevrons, curves and zigzags, and more. …The coincidence of these geometric motifs with representational images is one of the most puzzling aspects of Upper Paleolithic art. …images, six different kinds in all, are shimmering, incandescent, mercurial—and powerful. Called entoptic images—which means "within vision"—these phenomena are products of the basic neural architecture of the human brain.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

Art

“[BitCoin]'s the greatest scam of modern times. … the poor, the average mom-and-pop, the truck driver and the barber, who put their life savings into this, are going to lose their money, and be told to keep holding on, trust us, the value will go up. And they're gonna go bankrupt. They're gonna lose their life savings. … This is what happened with the dot-com boom, the grandma and grandpa lost their life savings. History is repeating itself. … We have these scamsters, basically, hyping the heck out of it, while all it's being used for is illegal money laundering. … It's simply gonna implode before you know it. And regular people who trust you are gonna lose their shirts. … Would you put your life savings into digital currency? You lose a password and you've lost everything. … They know it's gonna crash and burn. … it crashes and it goes to zero, and people lose their life savings. Don't do it. Get out of it, rather than losing everything you have. Yes, the price might increase, but more likely than not it's gonna be zero before you know it.”

Vivek Wadhwa American academic

Digital Gold or Ponzi Scheme? http://youtube.com/watch?v=mkSw04Guw0E on CNN (6 January 2018, 1045 EST)

Life , Money , People , History

“The floorboards point in parallel lines to a vanishing point that does not concern us -- somewhere beyond the opera house, across the streets, across the houses of the suburbs, all the way to a hypothetical single dot… on the sea's horizon. Far from this sour drama.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

Way , Housing , Sea

“Desire may be compared to a minute seed. It is like a big banyan tree growing out of a seed, which is no bigger than a dot.”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

[Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda, Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations, 292]

Tree

“The Pointillist chooses a means of expression by which he applies colour on a canvas in small dots rather than spreading it flat.”

Paul Signac (1863–1935) French painter

From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, 1899

“Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 89–99

World , Light , Despair , Night

“Hitchens: I've got another question for you, which is this: How many religions in the world do you believe to be false?
Craig: I don't know how many religions in the world there are, so I can’t answer.
Hitchens: Well, could you name... fair enough. I'll see if I can't narrow that down. That was a clumsily asked question, I admit. Do you regard any of the world's religions to be false?
Craig: Excuse me?
Hitchens: Do you regard any of the world's religions to be false preaching?
Craig: Yes, I think—yes, certainly.
Hitchens: Would you name one, then?
Craig: Islam.
Hitchens: That's quite a lot.
Craig: Pardon me?
Hitchens: That's quite a lot.
Craig: Yes.
Hitchens: Do you, therefore—do you think it's moral to preach false religion?
Craig: No.
Hitchens: So religion is responsible for quite a lot of wickedness in the world right there?
Craig: Certainly.
Hitchens: Right.
Craig: I'd be happy to concede (laughs) that. I would agree with that.
Hitchens: So if I was a baby being born in Saudi Arabia today, would you rather it was me or a Wahhabi Muslim?
Craig: Would I be—you rather be what?
Hitchens: Would you rather it was me—it was an atheist baby or a Wahhabi baby?
(Audience and Dr. Craig laugh):
Craig: I-I don't have any preference as to whether you would be... (laughing)
Hitchens: You don’t? As bad as that, O. K. Are there any—I'm sorry. I've only got a few seconds. It's a serious question. I shouldn't squander it. Are there any Christian denominations you regard as false?
Craig: Certainly.
Hitchens: Could I know what they are?
Craig: Well, I am not a Calvinist, for example. I think that certain tenets of Reformed Theology are incorrect. I would be more in the Wesleyan Camp myself. But these are differences among brethren. These are not differences on which we need to put one another in some sort of a cage. So within the Christian camp, there's a large diversity of perspectives. I'm sure there are views that I hold that are probably false, but I'm trying my best to get my theology straight, trying to do the best job. But I think all of us would recognize that none of us agree on every point of Christian doctrine, on every dot and tittle.”

William Lane Craig (1949) American Christian apologist and evangelist

Craig vs Christopher Hitchens debate, Biola University, La Mirada, California, 4th April 2009 http://www.reasonablefaith.org/does-god-exist-craig-vs-hitchens-apr-2009#section_6

World , Religion , Question , Thinking

“Since anonymous sources are being taken seriously, please allow me to share some tips I've received and keep the tipsters' identities anonymous. We've been warned by multiple high-ranking Democrat insiders that the Delaware Democrat and Republican political establishment is jointly planning to pull out all the stops to ensure I would never again upset the apple cart. Specifically they told me the plan was to crush me with investigations, lawsuits and false accusations so that my political reputation would become so toxic no one would ever get behind me. I was warned by numerous sources that the DE political establishment is going to use every resource available to them. So given that the king of the Delaware political establishment just so happens to be the vice president of the most liberal presidential administration in U. S. history, it is no surprise that misuse and abuse of the FBI would not be off the table. And further connecting the dots, do you think it is just a coincidence that Melanie Sloan was a senior Biden staffer just before she joined CREW and filed her complaint against me?!”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

Press statement, 2010-12-29, quoted in * Is There a Case Against Christine O'Donnell?
Slate
2010-12-29
http://www.slate.com/BLOGS/blogs/weigel/archive/2010/12/29/is-there-a-case-against-christine-o-donnell.aspx
2011-06-07
regarding an FBI criminal investigation into allegations she misused campaign funds for personal expenses

History , Thinking , Falseness

“… [Y]our observer's camera is clicking steadily. It's beautiful up above the sunlit clouds. The smooth drone of your twin motors makes you happy. You feel like singing and then you do. Then out of the corner of your eye, you see four black dots, growing larger momentarily. It's an enemy patrol of German Messerschmitts. Your gunner has seen them too. You hear the rattle of the machine gun as you put your bomber in a fast climbing turn, but the Messerschmitt fighters climb faster. They form under your tail, two on each side. One by one, they attack. A yellow light flashes in front of you. The first fighter slips away while the next comes on at you. Again that smashing yellow flame. Your observer falls over unconscious. Before you can think, the next Messerschmitt is upon you. A terrific jolt. Your port engine belches smoke. It's been hit…. You force-land on the first Allied airfield. That night, seated next to a hospital bed where your observer nurses a scalp wound, you hear an enemy communique. A British bomber was shot down over the lines today. Well, you puff a cigarette and grin.”

Larry LeSueur (1909–2003) American journalist

Woo, Elaine. " Larry LeSueur/'Murrow Boy' former war correspondant http://articles.latimes.com/2003/feb/07/local/me-lesueur7", (obituary), Los Angeles Times, February 8, 2003, accessed June 21, 2011. As quoted by Stanley W. Cloud and Lynne Olson in The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism, ISBN 0395877539. LeSueur just "after interviewing a young British pilot who had just flown a reconnaissance mission over Germany.

Beauty , Feeling , Thinking , Light

“Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn't strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 11

Life , God , Imagination , Intelligence

“Alas! So there is no escape from the question. Not for me, not for anyone! Then life is just breathing or running behind infinite number of questions? And then, what question is really? And what answer is too? This too a question. I observe the question mark carefully. And Eureka! I didn't know that my answer was encrypted and hidden in that symbol of a question mark. The dot below the curved stroke in a question mark symbolizes Zero as the question's answer itself, I never knew. Punctuation marks are so carefully crafted, I never knew!”

P. L. Deshpande (1919–2000) Marathi writer, humourist, actor, dramatist

citation needed
From his various literature

Life , Question

“I found a book on how to be invisible
You take a pinch of keyhole,
And fold yourself up,
You cut along the dotted lines.
You think inside out.
You're invisible.”

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

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sea of Honey (Disc 1)

Books , Thinking

“On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they [the Colonies] raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome in the height of her glory is not to be compared — a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drumbeat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

Speech (7 May 1834); reported in Edward Everett, ed., The Works of Daniel Webster (1851), page 110

Question , Suffering , Sun

“Singer worth their while must watch it;
Always count your dotted crotchet.”

Caryl Brahms (1901–1982) English critic, novelist, and journalist

Rappel 1910

“One and two and three and four,
Tell them what the girlie wore.
It was an itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka-dot bikini
That she wore for the first time today,
An itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka-dot bikini
So in the locker she wanted to stay”

Paul Vance (1929) American record producer

Song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" (1960)

Time

“Hey listen, I'm here to warn people, you keep telling me to shut up! This isn't a game! Okay? Our government, the US, is building FEMA camps. We have an NDAA where they disappear people now. You have this "arrest for public safety", life in prison. It's basically off with their heads, disappear 'em, take 'em away. Infowars dot com. Liberty is rising. Liberty is rising! Freedom will not stop! You will not stop freedom! You will not stop the Republic! Humanity is awakening! Infowars dot com! No, you guys are crazy, thinking that the public's too stupid! You're crazy, thinking the public doesn't know! You're crazy, thinking the public isn't waking up!”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

BBC's Sunday Politics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch9gQ9JOe3Y, 9 June 2013.
2013

Life , People , Stupidity , Guy

“A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

58 min 56 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Traveller's Tales [Episode 6]

Life , World , Home

“Babbage was one of the founders of the Cambridge Analytical Society whose purpose he stated was to advocate "the principles of pure d-ism as opposed to the dot-age of the university.”

W. W. Rouse Ball (1850–1925) English mathematician

W. W. Rouse Ball, History of Mathematics, (London, 1901), p. 451

Age , Universe

“Yes you see boys and girls, you see we came from a dot and that dot came from nothing. Now they call that Science and put it in a Science book? I’d call that a fairy tale and put it in the garbage.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Age of the Earth

Books , Girl , Boy , Science

“If anyone makes trouble I've advised him to dot him one on the jaw in the best British style.”

John Buchan book The House of the Four Winds

Source: The House of the Four Winds (1935), Ch. III

“Our Investigation has required EIGHT full time undercover investigative reporters embedded throughout the country from the bottom to the top of many political entities. Because we have hundreds of hours of footage, we needed to connect the dots and the scenes into a storyline that links it all together. It will be more impactful and more powerful instead of just putting it all out there at once or as soon as I got the video money shots individually. Long story short, everything you've heard about back room deals and smoke filled rooms are verified. We have smoking gun evidence and it is incredibly damning.”

James O'Keefe (1984) American conservative filmmaker

Reddit AMA https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/57jd2p/hi_im_james_okeefe_ask_me_anything/ (October 14, 2016)

Money , Time , Country

“When I make presentations about India at teachers' conferences or in classrooms, the two most often asked questions are: "Why do women wear a 'dot' on their foreheads?" and "Why, when there is so much poverty in India, don't they eat all those cows?" These questions broach issues of relevance and correlating non-Western practices to similar experiences in the students' lives, within a context they can comprehend.”

Yvette Rosser (1952) American activist

Rosser, Yvette C. (Winter 2001). "The Clandestine Curriculum: The Temple of Doom in the Classroom". Education About Asia (Association of Asian Studies) 6 (3).

Women , Question , Teachers

“Bonfires dot the rolling hillsides
Figures dance around and around
To drums that pulse out echoes of darkness
And moving to the pagan sound.”

Loreena McKennitt (1957) Canadian musician and composer

The Visit (1991), All Souls Night

Dance

“Ryan's freckles were a join-the-dot's enthusiast's wet dream.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

White Teeth (2000)

Dreams

“[Nasreddin Hoca is being shaved by an inexperienced barber. ]
"One moment, Sir!" said the barber, and he stuck a bit of cotton on the wound. In the next pass of the razor, another bit of the Hoca's cheek went with it. "One moment, sir!" and he stuck a bit of cotton on the second wound. With each stroke of the razor, another bit of cotton joined the crop sprouting on the Hoca's left cheek. "Now," said the barber, "I'll do the other side." "One moment, young man!" said the Hoca as he studied the bits of cotton that dotted his left cheek. "Stop right there! I believe I'll plant wheat on the other side."”

Nasreddin (1208–1284) philosopher, Sufi and wise man from Turkey, remembered for his funny stories and anecdotes

Barbara K. Walker and Helen Siegl, The Art of the Turkish Tale (1990), Vol. 1, , p. 57

Study

“You may think that Andrew Breitbart, Glenn Beck, Fox News, and BigGovernment-dot-com were fighting against an enemy, and the enemy was ACORN, but I do not think that's the case at all. I think the enemy they were fighting against are the media. By not covering the story, not at all … Breitbart showed that the media is no longer merely biased. They're no longer even ignoring the news. The mainstream media is now in the news suppression business.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

PJTV: How Breitbart Conquered ACORN (and the MSM) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKgjCDe0BSc (27 September 2009)
2000s

Business , Thinking , Fight

“We have never heard Seurat, Cross, Luce, Van de Velde or indeed Van Rysselberghe or Angrand speak of dots. We have never seen them be preoccupied by Pointillism. Read these lines, dictated by Seurat to Jules Christophe, his biographer: 'Art is harmony; harmony is the analogy between opposites and between similar elements of tone, tint and line. By tone I mean light and dark; tint is red and its complementary: green, orange and its complementary: blue, yellow and its complementary: purple... The method of expression relies on the optical mixture of tones, tints and their reactions”

Paul Signac (1863–1935) French painter

shadows that follow very strict rules
Quote from Maria Buszek, online - note 22 http://mariabuszek.com/mariabuszek/kcai/Expressionism/Readings/SignacDelaNeo.pdf
Seurat's quote from: Jules Christophe, Seurat, in 'Les Hommes d'aujourd'hui', no. 368, March-April 1890
From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, 1899

Art , Light , Reading

“Myths simply throw roadblocks in the path to enlightenment, and it is from truth that we have the most to learn. One man's truth, however, can be another's myth, and only through dispassionate and disinterested dissection of such stories can we tell the difference. The Confederate experience is dotted with episodes that are not particularly admirable.”

William C. Davis (1946) American historian

Source: The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy (1996), p. 178

Truth , Learning

“Really, we are
Not only dots
But are the whole”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Forgiveness
Lyrics, Memorial Address

“Yes: in the sea of life enisl’d,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"To Marguerite, in Returning a Volume of the Letters of Ortis" (1852), stanza 1

Life , Sea

“Take two opposites, connect the dots, and you have a straight line.”

Yahia Lababidi (1973)

Signposts to Elsewhere (2008)

“I was learning that, even for a woman with power, the path was dotted with land mines—she's so ambitious. she's so aggressive. she's ruthless. "Funny thing," I used to say, "a man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless... all a woman has to do is put you on hold."”

Marlo Thomas (1937) American actress, producer, and social activist

Growing Up Laughing: My Story and the Story of Funny http://books.google.com/books?id=pbVDuMYsLJQC&q=%22A+man+has+to+be+Joe+McCarthy+to+be+called+ruthless+All+a+woman+has+to+do+is+put+you+on+hold%22&pg=PT218#v=onepage (2010)

Learning

“Sometimes the answers are hiding in plain sight. A eureka moment came to Archimedes when he connected the dots between the ordinary routine of taking a bath and the scientific pursuit of determining the volume of an irregularly shaped object.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

“People, I am actually fairly smart. Why has this not occurred to anyone? The information is all out there, if you go looking for it, and the classified stuff just comes from analyzing the unclassified stuff and connecting the dots…”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

"Clancy Speaks Again, Briefly" (12 February 2000)
2000s

People

“Jordan itself is a beautiful country. It is wild, with limitless deserts where the Bedouin roam, but the mountains of the north are clothed in green forests, and where the Jordan River flows it is fertile and warm in winter. Jordan has a strange, haunting beauty and a sense of timelessness. Dotted with the ruins of empires once great, it is the last resort of yesterday in the world of tomorrow. I love every inch of it.”

Hussein of Jordan (1935–1999) King of Jordan

King Hussein http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/views_envi.html
Cited in: Arab Information Center, The Arab World https://books.google.nl/books?id=_7AMAQAAMAAJ&q=%22Jordan+itself+is+a+beautiful+country.+It+is+wild,+with+limitless+deserts+where+the+Bedouin+roam,+but+the+mountains+of+the+north+are+clothed+in+green+forests,+and+where+the+Jordan+River+flows+it+is+fertile+and+warm+in+winter.+Jordan+has+a+strange,+haunting+beauty+and+a+sense+of+timelessness.+Dotted+with+the+ruins+of+empires+once+great,+it+is+the+last+resort+of+yesterday+in+the+world+of+tomorrow.+I+love+every+inch+of+it%22&dq=%22Jordan+itself+is+a+beautiful+country.+It+is+wild,+with+limitless+deserts+where+the+Bedouin+roam,+but+the+mountains+of+the+north+are+clothed+in+green+forests,+and+where+the+Jordan+River+flows+it+is+fertile+and+warm+in+winter.+Jordan+has+a+strange,+haunting+beauty+and+a+sense+of+timelessness.+Dotted+with+the+ruins+of+empires+once+great,+it+is+the+last+resort+of+yesterday+in+the+world+of+tomorrow.+I+love+every+inch+of+it%22&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiE34nT8Z_LAhWGLA8KHbTAAH0Q6AEIJTAB, 1965, p. 30

Love , World , Beauty , Mountain

“We are all fellow passengers on a dot of earth. And each of us, in the span of time, has really only a moment among our companions. How incredible it is that in this fragile existence, we should hate and destroy one another. There are possibilities enough for all who will abandon mastery over others to pursue mastery over nature. There is world enough for all to seek their happiness in their own way.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, Inaugural address (1965)

Hate , World , Way , Nature

“I think continually of some way of painting without the dot. I hope to achieve this but I have not been able to solve the problem of dividing the pure tone without harshness... How can one combine the purity and simplicity of the dot with the fullness, suppleness, liberty, spontaneity and freshness of sensation postulated by our impressionist art? This is the question which preoccupies me, for the dot is meager, lacking in body, diaphanous, more monotonous than simple, even in the Seurat's, particularly in the Seurat's [paintings]... I'm constantly pondering this question, I shall go to the Louvre to look at certain painters who are interesting from this point of view. Isn't it senseless that there are no Turners [here]..”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Pissarro, Paris, 6 September 1888, in a letter to his son Lucien; from Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, pp. 131-132
1880's

Hope , Art , Way , Question

“[M]any quite frankly fought to protect slavery, which laid on the survivors of the rebel armies an incubus to which few were willing to admit in alter years. More than just one out of three Confederates whose campfires dotted South Mountain in the June dusk owned slaves… [T]hey brought slaves with them on campaign to tend to the menial jobs… The slave system had invested them with an instinctive impulse for domestic dictatorship; they could brawl, stab, and shoot, in and out of race tracks and saloons, and still assume that they were God's natural aristocrats.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

Source: 2010s, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (2013), p. 15

God , Mountain , Nature

“As collage technique replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas. Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk. There are 4,000,000 dots per second on one television screen, just think of the variety of images you can get. It's so cool. It's like going to the moon.”

Nam June Paik (1932–2006) American video art pioneer

Manifesto, New York, October 1965, as cited in Jasia Reichardt (1971). The computer in art. p. 95
1960s

Thinking , Painting

“There was one artist who wrote as beautifully as he painted. That was Hokusai - He speaks for all artists, whether they are painters or not. [He wrote]: "I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy three I have at last caught every aspect of nature-birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further. And I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime, and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life."”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Reflections (1981)

Love , Life , Secret , Age

“The sheer decibel level of unreason surrounding the issue of abortion in academic writing about animal rights tells us something interesting. It suggests that, contrary to what the utilitarians and feminists working this terrain wish, the dots between sympathy for animals and sympathy for unborn humans are in fact quite easy to connect—so easy, you might say, that a child could do it. … Since ethical vegetarianism as a practice appears commonly rooted in an a priori aversion to violence against living creatures, so does it often appear to begin in the young. … A sudden insight, igniting empathy on a scale that did not exist before and perhaps even a life-transforming realization—this reaction should indeed be thought through with care. It is not only the most commonly cited feature of the decision to become a vegetarian. It is also the most commonly cited denominator of what brings people to their convictions about the desperate need to protect unborn, innocent human life. … Despite those who act and write in their name, actual vegetarians and vegans are far more likely to be motivated by positive feelings for animals than by negative feelings for human beings. As a matter of theory, the line connecting the dots between “we should respect animal life” and “we should respect human life” is far straighter than the line connecting vegetarianism to antilife feminism or antihumanist utilitarianism.”

Mary Eberstadt American writer

"Pro-Animal, Pro-Life" https://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/06/pro-animal-pro-life, in First Things (June 2009).

Life , People , Feeling , Motivation

“I want you to connect these dots and see if you see what I see. Picture this. The Circle has been devouring all competitors for years, correct? It only makes the company stronger. Already 90 percent of the world's searches go through the Circle. Without competitors, this will increase. Soon it'll be nearly 100 percent. Now, you and I both know that if you can control the flow of information, you can control everything. You can control most of what anyone sees and knows. If you want to bury some piece of information, permanently, that's two seconds' work. If you want to ruin anyone, that's five minutes' work. How can anyone rise up against the Circle if they control all the information and access to it? They want everyone to have a Circle account, and they're well on their way to making it illegal not to. What happens then? What happens when they control all searches, and have full access to all data about every person? When they know every move everyone makes? When all monetary transactions, all health and DNA information, every piece of one's life, good or bad, when every word uttered flows through one channel?”

Dave Eggers book The Circle

Kalden/Ty, to Mae; pp. 487-488
The Circle (2013)

Life , Health , World , Way

“Dots […]: Small marks variously made to indicate infinity, hesitation, duplication, or lack of imagination.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

Imagination

“Yes, Johannes Vermeer [Dutch 17th century master painter] paints in thin layers – there is no waste effort – and those small dots – no, they are not like Seurat's, though they contain all the light the pointillist may have wished for, concentrated, hovering before the object, but not obliterating it... Vermeer is not a sun painter, but rather a moon-painter – like Uccello – that's good, it is the pure, final stage of art, the moment when it becomes more real than reality.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: 1942 - 1948, Arshile Gorky, – Goats on the roof' (2009), pp. 357-58: in: 'A visit to the Metropolitan Museum with Gorky', Ethel Schwabacher]], 1947

Art , Reality , Effort , Light

“Playboy: Then for now, aren't you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?
Jobs: In the future, it won't be an act of faith. The hard part of what we're up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, "What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?" he wouldn't have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn't have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.
Playboy: Meaning what?
Jobs: It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. And we're in the same situation today. Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won't work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are "slash q-zs" and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel—one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about. It's the first "telephone" of our industry. And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don't simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs, Playboy, Feb 1985, as quoted in “Steve Jobs Imagines 'Nationwide' Internet in 1985 Interview” https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-imagines-nationwide-internet-in-1985-intervi-1671246589, Matt Novak, 12/15/14 2:20pm Paleofuture, Gizmodo.
1980s

People , World , Faith , Way

“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it! — that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms — nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”

Joyce Carol Oates book You Must Remember This

You Must Remember This (1987), pt. 1, ch. 13

Color , Loss

“In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. A few months later I bought a cheap reproduction of a winter evening landscape, which I called 'Pharmacy' after assign two small dots, one red and one yellow, in the horizon. In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store an snow shovel on which I wrote 'In advance of the broken arm'. It was around that time that the word 'Readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1951 - 1968, Apropos of Ready Mades', 1961

Idea , Winter , Time , Happiness

“… each dot: the center of a circle without circumference …”

Frederick Franck (1909–2006) Dutch painter

Source: Echoes from the Bottomless Well (1985), p. 2

“Time' has a large part to play in looking at a picture. A picture (a stupid empty surface to begin with) gets covered in the course of its creation by a rhythmically measured network of colors, lines and dots, which evokes in its final form a total of living movement. The eye jumps from a blue to red, to green (even if there is only a change of form), to a black line, suddenly comes upon a sharp white eruption, follows it, floats on to... It is impossible to take it all-in at once. Time is inseparable from surface.”

August Macke (1887–1914) German painter of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter

Quote in Macke's letter to philosopher de:Eberhard Grisebach, March 1913; as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 145

Stupidity , Color , Change , Time

“I found an old baby picture of me… and it was somebody else - not me. It was somebody pink and fat. Who never heard of sick or lonely. Somebody who cried and got fed. And reached up and got held. Slept whenever she wanted to just by closing her eyes. Somebody who mainly just laid there and laughed at the colors waving over, round her head. And chewed on a polka-dot whale. And woke up knowing some new trick nearly every day. Rolled over and drooled on a sheet. Felt your hand pull the quilt back up over me. That's who I started out. And this is who's left.”

Marsha Norman (1947) American playwright, screenwriter and novelist

Jessie
night Mother (1983)

Color , Baby

“Frankly, I think there is something wrong with Jawlensky's dots [in his paintings, then]. Anybody can pick up that style if they want to.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

Quote of Kandinsky, c 1903; as cited by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 114
1910 - 1915

Thinking , Painting

“Have family reunions. There is something magic about the common sense of a blood bond. It's not less magic for black, white, brown or polka dot.”

Alex Haley (1921–1992) African American biographer, screenwriter, and novelist

TIME interview (1977)
Context: Have family reunions. There is something magic about the common sense of a blood bond. It's not less magic for black, white, brown or polka dot. The reunion gives a sense that the family cares about itself and is proud of itself. And there is the assumption that you, the family member, are obligated to reflect this pride and, if possible, add to it.

Family , Sense