Perpendicular Quotes

Dancing Is a Perpendicular Expression of a Horizontal Desire. (George Bernard Shaw)

Can imagination act Perpendicular to fact? Can it be a kite that flies Till the Earth, umbrella-wise, Folds and drops away from sight?

Philip José Farmer

Hence, as the line of sight to the upper part is the longer, it makes that part look as if it were leaning back. But when the members are inclined to the front, as described above, they will seem the beholder to be plumb and perpendicular.

Vitruvius

My mantra is "stay perpendicular.” Horizontal is not as good. Half the people that came along and up with with me are either gone to another dimension or don't remember what they had for lunch. I'm fortunate. I don't know why. I just want to have a good time.

Martin Landau

This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time.

Frances Willard

According to well-known electrodynamic laws, an electron moving in a magnetic field is acted upon by a force which runs perpendicular to the direction of motion of the electron and to the direction of the magnetic field, and whose magnitude is easily determined.

Pieter Zeeman

Translates to: for a triangle, the result of a perpendicular with the half-side is the area.

Aryabhata

Light from a concave luminous body is received most powerfully at the centre. The reason for this is that, for every point of a concave body, perpendicular rays, which are stronger than others, converge in the centre. Therefore the virtues of celestial bodies are incident most powerfully in and near the centre of the world.

John Peckham

With regard to the diagonal, too, I am in complete agreement with you [with Theo van Doesburg ]. As soon as it appears together with straight [horizontal and vertical] lines, I believe it should be condemned... A while back I started a thing entirely in diamonds [diamond-shape] like this [his sketch in the letter of several diamond-forms]. I have to find out if it's possible: intellectually I'm inclined to say it is. There's something to be said for the idea, because perpendicular and flat lines can be seen everywhere in nature; by using a diagonal line I would be canceling that out. But I'm inclined to say that this cannot be combined with perpendicular and flat lines or with different kinds of slanting lines.

Piet Mondrian

The simultaneousness of states of mind in the work of art: that is the intoxicating aim of our art... In the pictorial description of the various states of mind of a leave-taking, perpendicular lines, undulating lines and as it were worn out, clinging here and there to silhouettes of empty bodies, may well express languidness and discouragement. Confused and trepidating lines, either straight or curved, mingled with the outlined hurried gestures of people calling to one another will express a sensation of chaotic excitement. On the other hand, horizontal lines, fleeting, rapid and jerky, brutally cutting in half lost profiles of faces or crumbling and rebounding fragments of landscape, will give the tumultuous feelings of the person going away.

Umberto Boccioni

...the stereographic projection of the spherical surface. From the north pole P we draw radial lines to project every point of the surface of the sphere upon the horizontal plane [below, perpendicular to a line joining it to P and the sphere's center]. In general this transformation is unique and continuous, although the metrical relations are distorted; for the point P, however, it shows a singularity. Point P is mapped upon the infinite; i.e., no finitely located point of the plane corresponds to it. It can be shown that every transformation possesses a singularity in at least one point. The surface of the sphere is therefore called topologically different from the plane. Only a "sphere without a north pole" [point] would be topologically equivalent to a plane. ...such a sphere has a point-shaped hole without a boundary and is no longer a closed surface. (Hans Reichenbach)

He talked to her endlessly about his love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy and lost itself in the divine.

D. H. Lawrence

Allow me to repeat what I said when you were here: deal with nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, all placed in perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, a section of nature, or if you prefer, of the spectacle spread before our eyes by the 'Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus'. Lines perpendicular to that horizon give depth. But for us men, nature has more depth than surface, hence the need to introduce in our vibrations of light, represented by reds and yellows, enough blue tints to give a feeling of air.

Paul Cézanne

When she got to an angle of about 60 degrees, there was a sullen sort of rumbling roar as her massive boilers all left their beds and went crashing down through the bulkheads and everything that stood in their way.Up to that moment, she had stood out as clear as clear with her rows of electric lights all burning. When the boilers broke away, she was, of course, plunged into absolute darkness though her huge black outline was still perfectly distinct up against the stars and sky.Slowly she reared up on end till, at last, she was absolutely perpendicular. Then quite quietly, but quicker and quicker, she seemed just to slide away under the surface and disappear.As she vanished, everyone around me on the upturned boat, as though they could hardly believe it, just said, "She's gone."

Charles Lightoller

Treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone, the whole put into perspective so that each side of an object, or of a plane, leads towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth, whether a sections of nature, or, if you prefer, of the spectacle which Pater omnipotens aeterne Deus unfolds before your eyes. Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth... Everything I am telling you [ Joachim Gasquet ] about - the sphere, the cone, cylinder, concave shadow – on mornings when I'm tired these notions of mine get me going, they stimulate me, I soon forget them once I start using my eyes.

Paul Cézanne

It was the business of the Sorbonne doctors to discuss, of the pope to decide, and of a mathematician to go straight to heaven in a perpendicular line.

Jacques Ozanam

Leisure stands in a perpendicular position with respect to the working process - in just the same way as the "simple gaze" of intellectus does not consist in the "duration" (so to speak) of ratio's working-out process, but instead cuts through it at the perpendicular (the ancients compared the ratio with time, the intellectus with the "always now" of eternity).

Josef Pieper

We can in fact first place the beam of rays of moving positive atomic ions in a plane perpendicular to the axis in which we see the spectral lines emitted by them.

Johannes Stark

Companies have too many experts who block innovation. True innovation really comes from perpendicular thinking.

Peter Diamandis

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.

E. B. White

One mustn't criticize other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself. (Mark Twain)

The third general fact on which this theory is founded, is, that the stratified rocks, instead of being either horizontal, or nearly so, as they no doubt were originally, are now found possessing all degrees of elevation, and some of them even perpendicular to the horizon; to which we must add, that those strata which were once at the bottom of the sea are now raised up, many of them several thousand feet above its surface. ...This force, which has burst in pieces the solid pavement on which the ocean rests, and has raised up rocks from the bottom of the sea, into mountains... exceeds any which we see actually exerted, but seems to come nearer to the cause of the volcano or the earthquake than to any other, of which the effects are directly observed. The immense disturbance, therefore, of the strata, is in this theory ascribed to heat acting with an expansive power, and elevating those rocks which it had before consolidated.

James Hutton

He endeavoured to determine the resistance of a beam, one end of which is built into a wall, when the tendency to break it arises from its own or an applied weight; and he concluded that the beam tends to turn about an axis perpendicular to its length, and in the plane of the wall. This problem, and, in particular, the determination of this axis is known as Galileo's problem.

Galileo Galilei