Quotes About Motion

A halfman on a skatecart oared past with leather chocks.

The lights of the city hovered in a nimbus and again stood fractured in the black river, isinglass image, tangled broken shapes splash of lights along the bridgewalk following the elliptic and receding rows of the pole lamps across to meet them. The rhythmic arc of the wipers on the glass lulled him and he coasted out onto the bridge, into the city shrouded in rain and silence, the cars passing him slowly, their headlamps wan, watery lights in sorrowful progression.

You do not know what things you set in motion, he said. No man can know. No prophet foresee. The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments. Do you see? Not everything has such a value.

Being a hope is being in motion, on the move with body on the line, mind set on freedom, soul full of courage, and heart shot through with love. Being a hope is forging moral and spiritual fortitude, putting on intellectual armor, and being willing to live and die for the empowerment of the wretched of the earth.

Recall the pure joy of riding on a backyard swing: and easy cycle of motion, the momentum coming from the swing itself. Then swing carries us; we do not force it. We pump our legs to drive our arc higher, but gravity does most of the work. We are not so much swinging as being swung.

His projects conduct electricity, engage motion with toothed wheels, react in concert with universal laws of physics.

The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and the power of movement, of action, in man.

The salt, bitter passion of the sea, its indifference to the earth, its swinging, definite motion, its strength, its attack, and its salt burning, seemed to provoke her to a pitch of madness, tantalizing her with vast suggestions of fulfilment.

And it seemed she was like the sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving, heaving with a great swell, so that slowly her whole darkness was in motion, and she was Ocean rolling its dark, dumb mass.

There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe.

Speed on my book! spread your white sails my little bark athwart the       imperious waves

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow

Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much, The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion, The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love, The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much, I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther, But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

Lo, the unbounded sea,   On its breast a ship starting, spreading all sails, carrying even       her moonsails.   The pennant is flying aloft as she speeds she speeds so stately—       below emulous waves press forward,   They surround the ship with shining curving motions and foam.         I

We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion, The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables, The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm, The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here, And this is ocean's poem.

La Misma ola vagabunda que te lleva te devuelva.

When birds are descending near the ground and the head is below the tail, they lower the tail, which is spread wide open, and take short strokes with the wings; consequently, the head is raised above the tail, and the speed is checked so that the bird can alight on the ground without a shock."9 Ever notice all that?

See how the wings, striking against the air, sustain the heavy eagle in the thin air on high," he noted, then added, "As much force is exerted by the object against the air as by the air against the object."16 Two hundred years later, Newton would state a refined version of this as his third law of motion: "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

Einstein rejected the emission theory in favor of postulating that the speed of a light beam was constant no matter how fast its source was moving.

He was able to avoid pedantry by regularly bringing his theories down to earth, so to speak, and tying them to practical applications. As he instructed himself in a typical notebook jotting, "When you put together the science of the motions of water, remember to include under each proposition its application, in order that this science may not be useless."15

All of the other muscles he studied acted by pulling rather than pushing a body part, but the tongue seemed to be an exception. This was true in humans and in other animals. The most notable example is the tongue of the woodpecker. Nobody had drawn or fully written about it before, but Leonardo with his acute ability to observe objects in motion knew that there was something to be learned from it.

Leonardo's interest in machinery was linked to his fascination with motion.

So Einstein rejected the emission theory in favor of postulating that the speed of a light beam was constant no matter how fast its source was moving. "I came to the conviction that all light should be defined by frequency and intensity alone, completely independently of whether it comes from a moving or from a stationary light source," he told Ehrenfest.

Einstein's 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of atoms, explained Brownian motion, upended the concept of space and time, and produced what would become science's best known equation.