Top 124 Pendulum Quotes & Sayings

Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perennially rejuvenated illusions.

History has always been a series of pendulum swings, but the individual doesn't have to get caught in that.

As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.

Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

I think that the pendulum will swing back to the other side one day.

Our advanced and fashionable thinkers are, naturally, out on a wide swing of the pendulum, away from the previous swing of the pendulum.... They seem to have an un-argue-out-able position, as is the manner of sophists, but this is no guarantee that they are right.

I look fashionable every day. And the pendulum swings between more, or less, edgy when I'm with bankers.

Time confined into blind caves or extended through tunnels, responds to the call of infinity, which teases with its promise of freedom. outside the body, time is a pair of compasses in the hands of eternity, but inside it is a pendulum, fastened to the heart. the heart takes its measure from the lengthening swing of the pendulum surveying what time is left. in its own rhythm time spreads itself wildly here and there and is crippled elsewhere. its unequally distributed weight wounds my body - that is how the particularities of my life are manifest.

Your history is animal. Your future is divinity. Right now, you are like a pendulum, swinging between the two.

I certainly like to swing the pendulum and try new things and to do things that are different from the last thing that I did.

The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so sensitive.

It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.

If the pendulum swings, it may swing to a combination of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats and, thus, to a period of minority government or coalition, in some form.

So I think in those circumstances, there's some potential that you could see a big pendulum swing like 1994, which people you thought weren't vulnerable all of the sudden get in trouble.

We are now vibrating between too much and too little government, and the pendulum will rest finally in the middle.

Symbols need not limit their scope to this pendulum swing of images.

They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence.

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

From that moment the pendulum went into reverse

The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated.

Justice belongs to those who claim it, but let the claimant beware lest he create new injustice by his claim and thus set the bloody pendulum of revenge into its inexorable motion

For the better part of my last semester at Garden City High, I constructed a physical pendulum and used it to make a "precision" measurement of gravity. The years of experience building things taught me skills that were directly applicable to the construction of the pendulum. Twenty-five years later, I was to develop a refined version of this measurement using laser-cooled atoms in an atomic fountain interferometer.

The person who observes a clock, sees in it not only the pendulum swinging to and fro, and the dial-plate, and the hands moving, for a child can see all this; but he sees also the parts of the clock, and in what connexion the suspended weight stands to the wheel-work, and the pendulum to the moving hands.

In terms of our democracy, we are sort of shrugging our shoulders and saying, oh dear, Guantánamo, that's so awful, that's so awful, but it's here. The pendulum usually swings from left to right and then right to left, but there are so many people in power who have taken the pendulum and just pinned it to the right that there is a fear that it's never going to swing back.

I felt as if I were riding a pendulum. Just as I would swing into the abyss of hopelessness, the pendulum would swing back with some small goodness.

I am hopeful that the pendulum swings toward seeing immigrants in favorable terms once more.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law.

The pendulum swings between Light and Darkness

That is an annoying side of democracy. The pendulum falls often in the extreme, and then we have to bring it back. It's never stable; it's a permanent discussion about finding a way back.

The so called "progress," "time marching on," is not a straight line, but a pendulum.

Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.

I have problems with this very extreme form of capitalism where the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, where the focus is completely on the short term, and no one is thinking about the consequences.

The pendulum of economic power might well begin to shift from capital back to labor.

A scale is only in balance for a brief second. Inevitably the pendulum swings. It's impossible to maintain.

That's sort of overkill. We've had 70 years of the Ryder Cup, and it's gotten along just fine. The pendulum will swing back without making a monumental thing about it.

The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.

Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep for here There is such matter for all feelings: Man! Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear.

Now if this electron is displaced from its equilibrium position, a force that is directly proportional to the displacement restores it like a pendulum to its position of rest.

No! I don’t want to Ouija, or do the pendulum thing, and I swear if I see one tarot card or rune stone I’ll yack cupcake all over you. (Grace)

Ideas came with explosive immediacy, like an instant birth. Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum; it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.

Perhaps America works like this: Presidencies swing, as reactions to each other, like a pendulum. My optimistic belief is it is how we keep our country in balance.

In many ways, America is on the receiving end of a pendulum that has been swung with great force, and for a long time, outward into the world. The impact is a wake-up call on every level.

All right, the pendulum isn’t working. Sometimes you need an accelerant to help it.” – Death “Like gasoline?” – Nick “Yes, Nick. We’re going to set the book and your pendulum on fire and then use them ’cause we’re just that intelligent.” – Death

The everyday cares and duties, which men call drudgery, are the weights and counterpoises of the clock of time, giving its pendulum a true vibration and its hands a regular motion; and when they cease to hang upon its wheels, the pendulum no longer swings, the hands no longer move the clock stands still.

It had a very long pendulum, and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge, because it was the the kind of delibrate, annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life.

So often the pendulum contines to swing with the side that has just pulled themselves out of the hole.

No, no, no separate but equal... never the twain shall meet. And the pendulum kept swinging and it came to rest in the bastard hybrid known as the Daily Show.

... but the pendulum has swung way out of whack here. A bad idea is still bad, and the pivot happy world we're in today feels suboptimal.

Politics swings like a pendulum.

It's only fashion that has said the pendulum has swung from extreme skepticism about extraterrestrial life to extreme credulity. The truth is somewhere in between.

Maybe love is like a pendulum. It swings back and forth, slowly, steadily, and sometimes you don't know where it will come to rest.

As you get older you start to see these events and leaders, and movements of the pendulum swinging back.

We're waiting for the pendulum to swing back again, which I am absolutely confident it will.

Our culture is just a series of checks and balances. The whole idea that we're in a battle between tyranny and freedom - it's a series of pendulum swings.

Science gains from it [the pendulum] more than one can expect. With its huge dimensions, the apparatus presents qualities that one would try in vain to communicate by constructing it on a small [scale], no matter how carefully. Already the regularity of its motion promises the most conclusive results. One collects numbers that, compared with the predictions of theory, permit one to appreciate how far the true pendulum approximates or differs from the abstract system called 'the simple pendulum'.

Politics is a pendulum.

The Democratic and Republican parties each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one set of colluding quislings to the other, and back.

Who is moving in the distance? It is the clock's pendulum, Hired by the god of death To measure life.

I'm always fascinated by losers. Also, in my "Foucault's Pendulum," the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners.