Motion Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.

Frederick Buechner

A thousand wheels of labor are turned by dear affections, and kept in motion by self-sacrificing endurance; and the crowds that pour forth in the morning and return at night are daily procession of love and duty.

Edwin Hubbell Chapin

The phenomenon of the production of motion by heat has not been considered in a sufficiently general way... It is necessary to establish proofs applicable not only to steam engines but to all other heat-engines, irrespective of the working substance and the manner in which it acts.

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot

There is no motion in a straight line. A straight line infinitely projected becomes a circle.

Swami Vivekananda

Nature exists to the mind not as an absolute realization, but as a condition, as something constantly becoming... It is suggestive and prospective; a body in motion, and not an object at rest.

Science must grow. Its development is as necessary and as irresistible as the motion of the tides, or the flowing of the Gulf-Stream.

In one sense the principal difference between X-rays and the yellow light from a sodium flame is analogous to the difference between the air disturbances caused by an irregular jumble of sharp thin reports of small percussion caps, and the droning of a heavy organ pipe. One is a tangle of single shocks, the other a steady wave motion.

Ernest Fox Nichols

As the moon's fair image quaketh In the raging waves of ocean, Whilst she, in the vault of heaven, Moves with silent peaceful motion.

Every thing in the universe is in motion; the essence of nature is to act; and if we consider attentively its parts, we shall see that there is not a particle which enjoys absolute repose.

Baron d'Holbach

Just at the turn of the tide, nature held its breath - no bird sang, everything seemed to be waiting and waiting. And then, sure enough, as if someone had flicked a switch, everything started in motion again.

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's, smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own.

The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles, present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty. From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life.

Our thoughts are like roots which reach out in every direction into the cosmic ocean of formless energy, and these thought-roots set in motion vibrations like themselves and attract the affinities of our desires and ambitions.

Orison Swett Marden

In the primal state before any manifestation, when there was no motion but perfect balance, this Prakriti was indestructible, because decomposition or death comes from instability or change.

Swami Vivekananda

The beginning, middle, and end of the birth, growth, and perfection of whatever we behold is from contraries, by contraries, and to contraries; and whatever contrariety is, there is action and reaction, there is motion, diversity, multitude, and order, there are degrees, succession and vicissitude.

The hoop dancer dances within what encircles him, demonstrating how the people live in motion within the circling spirals of time and space. They are no more limited than water and sky. At green corn dance time, water and sky come together, in Indian time, to make rain.

Paula Gunn Allen

It will startle you to see what slaves we are to by-gone times-to Death, if we give the matter the right word!... We read in Dead Men's books! We laugh at Dead Men's jokes, and cry at Dead Men's pathos!... Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man's icy hand obstructs us!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Love works in a circle, for the beloved moves the lover by stamping a likeness, and the lover then goes out to hold the beloved inreality. Who first was the beginning now becomes the end of motion.

Two children, all alone and no one by,
Holding their tattered frocks, thro'an airy maze
Of motion lightly threaded with nimble feet
Dance sedately; face to face they gaze,
Their eyes shining, grave with a perfect pleasure.

Laurence Binyon

Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving toward it with rapidity. They strike; the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion. This is as perfect an instance of the relations of cause and effect as any which we know either by sensation or reflection.

To be haunted by past failures or satisfied with past successes is to arrest forward motion.

Rest and motion, unrelieved and unchecked, are equally destructive.

Benjamin N. Cardozo

Light and the rational forms are locked in combat; light sets them into motion, bends what is straight, makes parallels oval, inscribes circles in the intervals, makes the intervals active.

I am an old man now, and when I die and go to Heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics and the other is the turbulent motion of fluids. And about the former I am rather more optimistic.

The endless cycle of idea and action, / Endless invention, endless experiment, / Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; / Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; / Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.