Famous quotes containing the words straight line, straight and/or line:
“Mathematics ... would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mariner’s compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them. We are no nearer than Plato was. The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this New World always haunts the outskirts of his time, and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted, and, as it were, in a straight line.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)