Ellipsis Quotes

And we [The Futurist artists] must invent dynamic designs to go with them and express them in equally dynamic shapes: triangles, cones, spirals, ellipses, circles, etc. (Giacomo Balla)

Beauty cannot be defined by abscissas and ordinates; neither are circles and ellipses created by their geometrical formulas.

Carl von Clausewitz

To appreciate the nature of fractals, recall Galileo's splendid manifesto that "Philosophy is written in the language of mathematics and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which one wanders about in a dark labyrinth." Observe that circles, ellipses, and parabolas are very smooth shapes and that a triangle has a small number of points of irregularity. Galileo was absolutely right to assert that in science those shapes are necessary. But they have turned out not to be sufficient, "merely" because most of the world is of infinitely great roughness and complexity. However, the infinite sea of complexity includes two islands: one of Euclidean simplicity, and also a second of relative simplicity in which roughness is present, but is the same at all scales.

Benoît Mandelbrot

Of all the punctuation marks; he told me ellipses were his favorites.

Patrick Modiano

I must confess that this is no personal achievement of mine; this attitude was never striven for.... [ellipsis is in original, unabridged text] I've been shaped to this mental stance by the kind of experiences that I have fallen heir to. I say this neither in a tone of apology nor to persuade the reader in my ideological direction, but to give him a hinting clue as to why certain ideas and values appeal to me more than others, and why certain perspectives are stressed in these speeches.

Richard Wright

Planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus.

Johannes Kepler

If in two ellipses having a common major axis we take two such arcs that their chords are equal, and that also the sums of the radii vectores, drawn respectively from the foci to the extremities of these arcs, are equal to each other, then the sectors formed in each ellipse by the arc and the two radii vectores are to each other as the square roots of the parameters of the ellipses.

Johann Heinrich Lambert

I caution against beginning or ending a quotation with ellipses.

Bill Walsh

An ellipsis is a giant ocean of possibilities.

Jami Attenberg

Prose - it might be speculated - is discourse; poetry ellipsis.

Joyce Carol Oates

Prose - it might be speculated - is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds. (Joyce Carol Oates)

If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms ...

Jonathan Swift