A Quote by Benoit Mandelbrot

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

Benoit Mandelbrot

Quote Topics

Bark Circles Clouds Cones Does Lightning Line Mountains Nor Smooth Spheres Straight Straight Line Travel

Quote Author

Benoit Mandelbrot
French - Mathematician
November 20, 1924 - October 14, 2010

Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).

Vladimir Lenin

Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.

Benoit Mandelbrot

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it's curved like a road through mountains.

Tennessee Williams

The gods and their tranquil abodes appear, which no winds disturb, nor clouds bedew with showers, nor does the white snow, hardened by frost, annoy them; the heaven, always pure, is without clouds, and smiles with pleasant light diffused.

Lucretius

Because mountains are high and broad, the way of riding the clouds is always reached in the mountains; the inconceivable power of soaring in the wind comes freely from the mountains

Dogen

This is the difference between us Romans and the Etruscans: We believe that lightning is caused by clouds colliding, whereas they believe that clouds collide in order to create lightning. Since they attribute everything to gods, they are led to believe not that events have a meaning because they have happened, but that they happen in order to express a meaning.

Seneca the Younger

It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve - the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman.

Oscar Niemeyer

The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows, Are proud and implacable, passionate foes; It is always the same, wherever one goes. And the Pugs and the Poms, although most people say that they do not like fighting, will often display Every symptom of wanting to join in the fray. And they Bark bark bark bark bark bark Until you can hear them all over the park.

T. S. Eliot

The straight line is godless and immoral. The straight line is not a creative line, it is a duplicating line, an imitating line.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

When people look for the road in the clouds The cloud road disappears The mountains are tall and steep The streams are wide and still Green mountains ahead and behind White clouds to east and west If you want to find the cloud road Seek it within

Hanshan

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what's remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.

Benoit Mandelbrot

If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must think of God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.

C. S. Lewis

The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.

Benoit Mandelbrot

Giving never moves in a straight line - it always moves in circles.