Quotes about wave
page 5

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham photo

“Our seamen have always been famous for a matchless alacrity and intrepidity in time of danger; this has saved many a British ship, when other seamen would have run below deck, and left the ship to the mercy of the waves, or, perhaps, of a more cruel enemy, a pirate.”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (6 March 1741), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), p. 10.

Mark Pesce photo
Edward Fredkin photo

“Cellular automata are now being used to model varied physical phenomena normally modelled by wave equations, fluid dynamics, Ising models, etc. We hypothesize that there will be found a single cellular automaton rule that models all of microscopic physics; and models it exactly. We call this field DM, for digital mechanics.”

Edward Fredkin (1934) American physicist and computer scientist, a pioneer of digital physics

[An informational process based on reversible universal cellular automata, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 45, 1–3, September 1990, 254–270, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016727899090186S, 10.1016/0167-2789(90)90186-S]

Ayn Rand photo
Michael Swanwick photo
Susan Cooper photo
Heath Ledger photo

“In this industry, interest in you comes in waves, it's so tidal. And so I don't really want to jump on the first wave that comes along.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Quoted in "Heath Ledger's Lonesome Trail" http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/9448111/heath_ledgers_lonesome_trail/print, Rolling Stone, March 23, 2006.

John Ogilby photo
Charles Symmons photo
Anne Sexton photo
John Keats photo
Ogden Nash photo
John Milton photo
Bill Bryson photo

“Well, I didn't ever think about Australia much. To me Australia had never been very interesting, it was just something that happened in the background. It was Neighbours and Crocodile Dundee movies and things that never really registered with me and I didn't pay any attention to it at all. I went out there in 1992, as I was invited to the Melbourne Writers Festival, and I got there and realised almost immediately that this was a really really interesting country and I knew absolutely nothing about it. As I say in the book, the thing that really struck me was that they had this prime minister who disappeared in 1967, Harold Holt and I had never heard about this. I should perhaps tell you because a lot of other people haven't either. In 1967 Harold Holt was prime minister and he was walking along a beach in Victoria just before Christmas and decided impulsively to go for a swim and dove into the water and swam about 100 feet out and vanished underneath the waves, presumably pulled under by the ferocious undertow or rips as they are called, that are a feature of so much of the Australian coastline. In any case, his body was never found. Two things about that amazed me. The first is that a country could just lose a prime minister — that struck me as a really quite special thing to do — and the second was that I had never heard of this. I could not recall ever having heard of this. I was sixteen years old in 1967. I should have known about it and I just realised that there were all these things about Australia that I had never heard about that were actually very very interesting. The more I looked into it, the more I realised that it is a fascinating place. The thing that really endeared Australia to me about Harold Holt's disappearance was not his tragic drowning, but when I learned that about a year after he disappeared the City of Melbourne, his home town, decided to commemorate him in some appropriate way and named a municipal swimming pool after him. I just thought: this is a great country.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

The pool was under construction before he disappeared and is located in the electorate he represented.
Interview with Stanford's Newsletter (June 2001)

Paul Scofield photo

“I decided a long time ago I didn’t want to be a star personality and live my life out in public. I don’t think it’s a good idea to wave personality about like a flag and become labeled.”

Paul Scofield (1922–2008) English actor

Quoted in Benedict Nightingale, "Paul Scofield, British Actor, Dies at 86" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/movies/21scofield.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin, The New York Times (2008-03-21)

Henry David Thoreau photo
Stephen Crane photo
Bob Dylan photo

“I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

Kevin Kelly photo

“As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Laurence Hope photo

“I would have rather felt you round my throat
Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!”

Kashmiri Song
Indian Love Lyrics (aka Garden of Kama) (1901)

Théodore Guérin photo
Poul Anderson photo
Anaïs Nin photo
Mahmud of Ghazni photo
Simone Weil photo
Frederick Douglass photo

“I believe in individuality, but individuals are, to the mass, like waves to the ocean. The highest order of genius is as dependent as is the lowest.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1870s, Self-Made Men (1872)

George Lippard photo
Frank Wilczek photo
Koichi Tohei photo
Charles Krauthammer photo
Neil Peart photo
Epes Sargent photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
William Gibson photo
Emily Brontë photo
Alan Keyes photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Arthur C. Clarke photo

“There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

As quoted in Values of the Wise : Humanity's Highest Aspirations (2004) by Jason Merchey, p. 31
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

Anne Brontë photo
David Bohm photo
Vitruvius photo

“Voice is a flowing breath of air, perceptible to the hearing by contact. It moves in an endless number of circular rounds, like the innumerably increasing circular waves which appear when a stone is thrown into smooth water, and which keep on spreading indefinitely from the centre unless interrupted by narrow limits, or by some obstruction which prevents such waves from reaching their end in due formation. When they are interrupted by obstructions, the first waves, flowing back, break up the formation of those which follow.”

Alternate translation: The voice is a flowing breath, made sensible to the organ of hearing by the movements it produces in the air. It is propagated in infinite numbers of circular zones, exactly as when a stone is thrown into a pool of standing water countless circular undulations are generated therein, which, increasing as they recede from the center, spread out over a great distance, unless the narrowness of the locality or some obstacle prevent their reaching their termination; for the first line or waves, when impeded by obstructions, throw by their backward swell the succeeding circular lines of waves into confusion. Quoted by Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of its Development (1893, 1960) Tr. Thomas J. McCormack
Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book V, Chapter IV, Sec. 6

Elie Wiesel photo
KT Tunstall photo
Ian Hacking photo
Erasmus Darwin photo
Percy Bysshe Shelley photo
Robert Burns photo

“The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, O!”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

Misquotation by W. B. Yeats of Burns's "Open the Door to me, Oh" http://www.robertburns.org/works/397.shtml (1793) in Ideas of good and evil (1907), p. 241; the original reads: "The wan Moon is setting beyond the white wave,/ And Time is setting with me, oh!"
Misattributed

Philip Warren Anderson photo
Henry Adams photo
John E. Sununu photo
Robert E. Howard photo
Sri Aurobindo photo

“What the Divine wants is for man to embody Him here, in the individual and in the collectivity… to realise God in life. The old system of yoga could not harmonise or unify Spirit and life; it dismissed the world as Maya or a transient play of God. The result has been a diminution of life-power and the decline of India. The Gita says, utsideyur ime loka na kuryam karma cedaham ["These peoples would crumble to pieces if I did not do actions," 3.24]. Truly 'these peoples' of India have gone to ruin. What kind of spiritual perfection is it if a few Sannyasins, Bairagis and Saddhus attain realisation and liberation, if a few Bhaktas dance in a frenzy of love, god-intoxication and Ananda, and an entire race, devoid of life, devoid of intelligence, sinks to the depths of extreme tamas?… But now the time has come to take hold of the substance instead of extending the shadow. We have to awaken the true soul of India and in its image fashion all works…. I believe that the main cause of India's weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think… incapacity of thought or 'thought-phobia'…. The mediaeval period was a night, a time of victory for the man of ignorance; the modern world is a time of victory for the man of knowledge. It is the one who can fathom and learn the truth of the world by thinking more, searching more, labouring more, who will gain more Shakti. Look at Europe, and you will see two things: a wide limitless sea of thought and the play of a huge and rapid, yet disciplined force. The whole Shakti of Europe lies there. It is by virtue of this Shakti that she has been able to swallow the world, like our Tapaswins of old, whose might held even the gods of the universe in awe, suspense and subjection. People say that Europe is rushing into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions, all these upsettings are the initial stages of a new creation….. We, however, are not worshippers of Shakti; we are worshippers of the easy way…. Our civilisation has become ossified, our Dharma a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of intoxication. So long as this state of things lasts, any permanent resurgence of India is impossible…. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and so the Shakti has abandoned us…. You say what is needed is emotional excitement, to fill the country with enthusiasm. We did all that in the political field during the Swadeshi period; but all we did now lies in the dust…. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement, feeling and mental enthusiasm the base. I want to make a vast and heroic equality the foundation of my yoga; in all the activities of the being, of the adhar [vessel] based on that equality, I want a complete, firm and unshakable Shakti; over that ocean of Shakti I want the vast radiation of the sun of Knowledge and in that luminous vastness an established ecstasy of infinite love and bliss and oneness. I do not want tens of thousands of disciples; it will be enough if I can get as instruments of God a hundred complete men free from petty egoism. I have no faith in the customary trade of guru. I do not want to be a guru. What I want is that a few, awakened at my touch or at that of another, will manifest from within their sleeping divinity and realise the divine life. It is such men who will raise this country.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1920, Letter to Barin Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's brother, Translated from Bengali
India's Rebirth

Albert O. Hirschman photo

“As they toil they are whirled round by a furious wave.”
Unda laborantes praeceps rotat.

Source: Argonautica, Book IV, Line 656

Richard Henry Dana Jr. photo
Peter Gabriel photo

“Turning the tide, you are on the incoming wave.
Turning the tide, you know you are nobody's slave.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Shaking the Tree
Song lyrics, Shaking the Tree (1990)

Heinrich Hertz photo
Julia Ward Howe photo

“He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is wisdom to the mighty, he is succour to the brave,
So the world shall be his footstool, and the soul of Time his slave,
Our God is marching on.”

Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) American abolitionist, social activist, and poet

First manuscript version (19 November 1861).
The Battle Hymn of the Republic (1861)

Thomas Young (scientist) photo
Phil Ochs photo

“So do your duty, boys, and join with pride
Serve your country in her suicide
Find the flags so you can wave goodbye
But just before the end even treason might be worth a try
This country is too young to die
I declare the war is over
It's over, it's over.”

Phil Ochs (1940–1976) American protest singer and songwriter

"The War Is Over" http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/war-is-over.html from Tape from California (1968)
Lyrics

William Cowper photo

“Toll for the brave —
The brave! that are no more;
All sunk beneath the wave,
Fast by their native shore!”

William Cowper (1731–1800) (1731–1800) English poet and hymnodist

"On the Loss of the Royal George", st. 1 (1791).

Statius photo

“For what cause, youthful Sleep, kindest of gods, or what error have I deserved, alas to lack your boon? All cattle are mute and birds and beasts, and the nodding tree-tops feign weary slumbers, and the raging rivers abate their roar; the ruffling of the waves subsides, the sea is still, leaning against the shore.”
Crimine quo merui, juvenis placidissime divum, quove errore miser, donis ut solus egerem, Somne, tuis? tacet omne pecus volucresque feraeque et simulant fessos curvata cacumina somnos, nec trucibus fluviis idem sonus; occidit horror aequoris, et terris maria adclinata quiescunt.

iv, line 1
Silvae, Book V

James Gates Percival photo

“The water is calm and still below,
For the winds and waves are absent there,
And the sands are bright as the stars that glow
In the motionless fields of upper air.”

James Gates Percival (1795–1856) American geologis, poet, and surgeon

The coral Grove, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

John Tyndall photo

“Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on the subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

Professor Virchow and Evolution.
Fragments of Science, Vol. II (1879)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Johannes Grenzfurthner photo
Lois McMaster Bujold photo
Michael Swanwick photo

““You ask a question that cannot be answered without knowing the nature of the primal chaos from which being arose. Is Spiral Castle like a crystal, once shattered, forever destroyed? That is what I prefer to believe. Or is it like a still pond, whose mirrored surface may be shattered and churned, but which will inevitably restore itself as the waves die down? You may believe this if you choose. You can even believe—why not?—that the restored universe will be an improvement on the old. For me, so long as I have my vengeance I care not what comes after.”
“And us?”
“We die.” An involuntary rise in the dragon’s voice, a slight quickening of cadence, told her that she had touched upon some unclean hunger akin to but less seemly than battle-lust. “We die beyond any chance of rebirth. You and I and all we have known will cease to be. The worlds that gave us birth, the creatures that shaped us—all will be unmade. So comprehensive will be their destruction that even their pasts will die with them. It is an extinction beyond death that we court. Though the ages stretch empty and desolate into infinity and beyond, there will be none to remember us, nor any to mourn. Our joys, sorrows, struggles, will never have been.
“And even if there is a universe to come, it will know naught of us.””

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 19 (pp. 340-341)

James Gates Percival photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes photo
Manuel Castells photo
Abby Sunderland photo

“If a big wave came at the wrong moment, it would sweep me off into forty-eight-degree water, where I might last twenty minutes. Drowning quickly might be better.”

Abby Sunderland (1993) Camera Assistant, Inspirational Speaker and Sailor

Source: Unsinkable: A Young Woman's Courageous Battle on the High Seas (2011), p. 124

Ellen Willis photo
Herrick Johnson photo
Tecumseh photo

“The Muscogee was once a mighty people. The Georgians trembled at your war-whoop, and the maidens of my tribe, on the distant lakes, sung the prowess of your warriors and sighed for their embraces. Now your very blood is white; your tomahawks have no edge; your bows and arrows were buried with your fathers. Oh! Muscogees, brethren of my mother, brush from your eyelids the sleep of slavery; once more strike for vengeance; once more for your country. The spirits of the mighty dead complain. Their tears drop from the weeping skies. Let the white race perish! They seize your land, they corrupt your women, they trample on your dead! Back! whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven! Back! back — ay, into the great water whose accursed waves brought them to our shores! Burn their dwellings! Destroy their stock! Slay their wives and children! The red man owns the country, and the pale-face must never enjoy it! War now! War forever! War upon the living! War upon the dead! Dig their very corpses from the graves! Our country must give no rest to the white man's bones.”

Tecumseh (1768–1813) Native American leader of the Shawnee

Speech to the Creek people, quoted in Great Speeches by Native Americans by Robert Blaisdel. This quote appeared in J. F H. Claiborne, Life and Times of Gen. Sam Dale, the Mississippi Partisan (Harper, New York, 1860). However, historian John Sugden writes, "Claiborne's description of Tecumseh at Tuckabatchie in the alleged autobiography of the Fontiersman, Samuel Dale, however, is fraudulent. … Although they adopt the style of the first person, as in conventional autobiography, the passages dealing with Tecumseh were largely based upon published sources, including McKenney, Pickett and Drake's Life of Tecumseh. The story is cast in the exaggerated and sensational language of the dime novelist, with embellishments more likely supplied by Claiborne than Dale, and the speech put into Tecumseh's mouth is not only unhistorical (it has the British in Detroit!) but similar to ones the author concocted for other Indians in different circumstances." Sugden also finds it "unreliable" and "bogus." Sugden, John. "Early Pan-Indianism; Tecumseh’s Tour of the Indian Country, 1811-1812." American Indian Quarterly 10, no. 4 (1986): 273–304. doi:10.2307/1183838.
Misattributed, "Let the White Race Perish" (October 1811)

Heather Brooke photo
Joseph Goebbels photo

“I put down the oars and float endlessly as if to the eternal shore. Blue light of the moon shines on my sail. My boat is gliding to a secure haven. Only silent waves break against it. Deepest silence surrounds me and my soul builds a golden bridge to a star.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Ich lege die Ruder ein und fahre endlos, wie einem ewigen Gestade zu. Mondlicht spielt blau auf meinem Segel. Mein Nachen gleitet in einen sicheren Hafen. Nur leise schlagen die Wellen an meinen Kahn. Die tiefste Stille ist um mich, und meine Seele spannt eine goldene Brücke zu einem Stern.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Max Heindel photo
Charles Reis Felix photo
Carver Mead photo
Alison Bechdel photo
Shashi Tharoor photo
Patrick Buchanan photo

“Given the shrinking populations inside Europe and the waves of immigrants rolling in from Africa and the Middle and Near East, an Islamic Europe seems to be in the cards before the end of the century.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

"If God is Dead..." https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/if-god-is-dead/ (April 26, 2016), Chronicles
2010s

George William Russell photo
Miklós Horthy photo
Maxine Waters photo