Quotes About Symmetry

If I've learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.

Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the six surfaces of revolution symmetrical around an axis, the plane, the sphere, the cylinder, the catenoid, the unduloid, and the nodoid; shapes without the names, but the shapes alone were like names. Spatializing language.

to speak of "polarization" is to assume symmetry. No fact emerges more clearly from our analysis of how four million political stories were linked, tweeted, and shared over a three-year period than that there is no symmetry in the architecture and dynamics of communications within the right-wing media ecosystem and outside of it.

Her taste for symmetry and structure, it helped her thoughts drift. Symmetry did not chain her, it set her free. (p. 85)

The main difference between these alternatives is symmetry. Dependence is an asymmetrical involvement: One person needs the other, but not vice versa, so the needy person is one-down. Interdependence is symmetrical: Both parties rely on each other, so neither is one-up or one-down. Moreover

...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.

On top of a goodly helping of baby lettuce, Grace placed a neat rectangle of grilled salmon, and then precisely five cherry tomatoes, five broccoli florets, five baby carrots, five cucumber slices, and five slices of green bell pepper. She liked the balance and symmetry of the meal she had made. Still, she liked almonds more, and daring to disrupt the balance of the universe, she threw in a spoonful of an unknown number.

The photos on her page had not done justice to the arresting, wide-eyed symmetry of her face, the radiant shine of her hair. She was 'clean': no piercings, tattoos or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos drop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?" (p. 314)

And why wander in these labyrinths? Once more, for aesthetic reasons; because this present infinity, these "vertiginous symmetries," have their tragic beauty. The form is more important than the content.

I'm probably borderline OCD. I insist on having all objects at right angles to each other. So a fork has to be at a right angle to the knife on the table. The salt and pepper pots have to be placed close together. Only recently have I started to notice it's a weird way to behave.

I was an ambidextrous child, and the symmetry of roller skating was a welcome respite from my awkwardness with physical activities that involved a ball or a racket.

Circle are praised, not that abound, In largeness, but the exactly round.

Beauty is boring because it is predictable.

Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty and perfection.

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

We endeavour to employ only symmetrical figures, such as should not only be an aid to reasoning, through the sense of sight, but should also be to some extent elegant in themselves.

The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.

I heave the basketball; I know it sails in a parabola, exhibiting perfect symmetry, which is interrupted by the basket. It's funny, but it is always interrupted by the basket.

Mathematics is the science of patterns, and nature exploits just about every pattern that there is.

There could be whole antiworlds and antipeople made out of antiparticles. However, if you ever meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.

The beauty of life is, therefore, geometrical beauty of a type that Plato would have much appreciated.

[T]he small is great, the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity.

This is no science, this is art, where equations fall away to elements like resolving chords, and where always prevails a symmetry either explicit or multiplex, but always of a crystalline serenity.

Like will draw like.