Flatland Quotes

“you are not a man, but a feminine monstrosity with a bass voice!”
― Edwin A. Abbott

“إنّ الرضا عن الذات مرادف للانحطاط والجهل، وطموح المرء خيرٌ له من قناعة زائفة تعمي عينيه وتُغلّ يديه”
― Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland / Sphereland

“If our sides were unequal our angles might be unequal. Instead of its being sufficient to feel, or estimate by sight, a single angle in order to determine the form of an individual, it would be necessary to ascertain each angle by the experiment of Feeling. But life would be too short for such a tedious groping. The whole science and art of Sight Recognition would at once perish; Feeling, so far as it is an art, would not long survive; intercourse would become perilous or impossible; there would be an end to all confidence, all forethought; no one would be safe in making the most simple social arrangements; in a word, civilization would relapse into barbarism.”
― Edwin Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“They speak about 'right' or 'wrong' as vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names represented real existences, and that a human figure is really capable of choosing between them.”
― Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

“We crossed a wide river and then everything changed. There were no more fields, no houses, no trees, not even telephone poles. Even the colours were gone, all of them except brown and grey and blue of the late-afternoon sky. The world got emptier and emptier until it looked like a brown ocean of dead velvet, just emptiness covered with short dry grass and low scrub.”
― Lynda Barry, Cruddy

“In all human cultures, the social world has two clear dimensions: a horizontal dimension of closeness or liking, and a vertical one of hierarchy or status. . . . Now imagine yourself happily moving around your two-dimensional social world, a flat land where the X axis is closeness and the Y axis is hierarchy. Then one day, you see a person do something extraordinary, or you have an overwhelming experience of natural beauty , and you feel lifted “up.” But it is not the “up” of hierarchy, it’s some other kind of elevation. This chapter is about that vertical movement. My claim is that the human mind perceives a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension that I will call “divinity.”
― Jonathan Haidt

“In a barren culture, one or two fragmentary story-themes play, like a broken record, broadcasting the same notes over and over again.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés