Infinitesimal Quotes

Outside shadows are blue, I read, because they are lighted by the blue sky and not the yellow sun. Their blueness bespeaks infinitesimal particles scattered down inestimable distance. ~ Annie Dillard

They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and one is so easily bruised, so swiftly wounded, one falls to the first barbed word. To-day, wrapped in the complacent armour of approaching middle age, the infinitesimal pricks of day by day brush one but lightly and are soon forgotten, but then - how a careless word would linger, becoming a fiery stigma, and how a look, a glance over a shoulder, branded themselves as things eternal. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

To be whole and harmonious, man must also know the music of the beaches and the woods. He must find the thing of which he is only an infinitesimal part and nurture it and love it, if he is to live. ~ William O. Douglas

One infinitesimal change in that bunch of circumstances and everything would have been quite different… ~ Gonzalo Guma

Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing. ~ D.H. Lawrence

In the lassitude after love Odysseus asks Circe, "What is the way to the land of the dead?"

Circe answers, "You are muffled in folds of heavy fabric. You close your eyes against the rough cloth and though you struggle to free yourself you can barely move. With much thrashing and writhing, you manage to throw off another layer, but find that not only is there another one beyond it, but that the weight bearing you down has scarcely decreased. With dauntless spirit you continue to struggle. By infinitesimal degrees, the load becomes lighter and your confinement less. At last, you push away a piece of coarse, heavy cloth and, relieved, feel that it was the last one. As it falls away, you realize you have been fighting through years. You open your eyes. ~ Zachary Mason

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and it is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium - as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom - well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining. ~ Primo Levi

I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

"I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961 ~ Sylvia Plath

The contribution of West African languages to Ebonics is absolutely infinitesimal. What it actually is is a very interesting hybrid of regional dialects of Great Britain that slaves in America were exposed to because they often worked alongside the indentured servants who spoke those dialects that we often learn about in school. ~ John McWhorter

The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence ... the gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skepticism and reason ~ Steven Pinker

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things. ~ C.V. Wedgwood

In the infinitesimal glow of the stars,
the trees and flowers were strewing
their cool odos. There was no moon. ~ Sylvia Plath

Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road. So much so is this that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost traveling a half mile ahead of its own shape. ~ William Faulkner

I want you - "
"Then fucking have me."
" - but I don't want this."
Alex wants to grab Henry and shake him, wants to scream in his face, wants to smash every priceless antique in the room.
"What does that even mean?"
"I don't want it!" Henry practically shouts. His eyes are flashing, wet and angry and afraid. "Don't you bloody see? I'm not like you. I can't afford to be reckless. I don't have a family who will support me. I don't go about shoving who I am in everyone's faces and dreaming about a career in fucking politics, so I can be more scrutinized and picked apart by the entire godforsaken world. I can love you and want you and still not want that life. I'm allowed, all right, and it doesn't make me a liar; it makes me a man with some infinitesimal shred of self-preservation, unlike you, and you don't get to come here and call me a coward for it. ~ Casey McQuiston

Opposing Keystone, it goes without saying, will not make the slightest difference to things opponents claim to care about. It will not alter by an infinitesimal fraction of a degree mankind's reliance on fossil fuels or the continued development of hydrocarbon resources. ~ Anonymous

But our intuitive conception of time differs from the ceaseless cosmic stream envisioned by Newton and Kant. To begin with, our experience of the present is not an infinitesimal instant. Instead it embraces some minimum duration, a moving window on life in which we apprehend not just the instantaneous "now" but a bit of the recent past and a bit of the impending future. ~ Steven Pinker

If liberals can seize our guns because they are dangerous, we have no chance of holding on to our cars and our homes. The total number of accidental fatalities (the majority of which are hunting accidents) of all types of firearms is infinitesimal compared to the number of fatalities from car and home accidents. More children die from playing with cigarette lighters than from playing with loaded guns. ~ Paul Craig Roberts

[O]ften one listens and hears nothing, if it is a piece of music at all complicated to which one is listening for the first time. And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played over to me two or three times I found that I knew it quite well. And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally 'first hearings' and there would be no reason why one should understand it any better after the tenth. Probably what is wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory. For our memory, compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them, or as that of a man in his second childhood who cannot recall, a minute afterwards, what one has just been saying to him. Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture. But that picture gradually takes shape, and, with regard to works which we have heard more than once, we are like the schoolboy who has read several times over before going to sleep a lesson which he supposed himself not to know, and finds that he can repeat it by heart next morning. It was only that I had not, until then, heard a note of the sonata, whereas Swann and his wife could make out a distinct phrase that was as far bey ~ Marcel Proust

Gods, like humans," he said, "are order imposed on chaos. With humans, the imposition is easy to see. Millions of cells, long twisted chains of atoms, so much bone and blood and juice, every piece performing its function. When one of those numberless pumps refuses to beat, when one of those infinitesimal pipes gets blocked, all the pent-up chaos springs forward like a bent sword, and the soul is lost to the physical world unless something catches it first. ~ Max Gladstone

The sea was no stranger to the rock on the beach. The sea came often to the rock, rushing up wetly against its warm grey, and always as it swept away it took an infinitesimal part of the rock with it. The rock had known the waves for a long time, and learned it was in its nature to erode. ~ Chew Chia Shao Wei

The genius of the occupation, I came to see, is that the noose is tightened in such infinitesimal increments that the movement is virtually invisible to the rest of the world. ~ Chivvis Moore

He found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.
And Colin thought: Because like say I tell someone about my feral hog hunt. Even if it's a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward - ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter - maybe less than a lot, but always more than some. ~ John Green

I listened to what was being said without feeling – as I came to feel later – that I was, in one sense, part and parcel of the same community; that when people gossiped about matters like Carolo and his girl, one was listening to a morsel, if only an infinitesimal morsel, of one's own life. ~ Anthony Powell

Nevertheless, when it is your lot to have to endure something that is (or seems to you) worse than the ordinary lot of mankind, Spinoza's principle of thinking about the whole, or at any rate about larger matters than your own grief, is a useful one. There are even times when it is comforting to reflect that human life, with all that is contains of evil and suffering, is an infinitesimal part of the life of the universe. Such reflections may not suffice to constitute a religion, but in a painful world they are a help towards sanity and an antidote to the paralysis of utter despair. - about Spinoza ~ Bertrand Russell

Memory cannot be understood, either, without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory. No one has ever tried to calculate this ratio, and in fact there exists no technique for doing so; yet without much risk of error I could assume that the memory retains no more than a millionth, a hundred-millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life. That fact too is part of the essence of man. If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at any time call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings: neither his loves nor his friendships nor his angers nor his capacity to forgive or avenge would resemble ours.

We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the ~ Milan Kundera

You couldn't wait for that; you were there, and everything that is barely measurable ― an emotion that rises by half a degree, the angle of deflection, read off from up close, of a will burdened by an almost infinitesimal weight, the slight cloudiness in a drop of longing, and that barely perceptible color-change in an atom of confidence ― all this you had to determine and record. For it is in such reactions that life existed, our life, which has slipped into us, had drawn back inside us so deeply that it was hardly possible even to make conjectures about it any more. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything ... All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest. ~ Albert Einstein

I do have faith. I don't have faith that a God exists, nor do I have faith that one does not; I have absolute faith that I do not know, cannot know, am only human, am an infinitesimal creature packed onto a cramped planet crowded with seven billion bodies, and as many yearning hearts, and as many questioning minds. ~ Marya Hornbacher

When man comes to the realization that he is not the "favorite" of God; that he was not specially created, that the universe was not made for his benefit, and that he is subject to the same laws of nature as all other forms of life, then, and not until then, will he understand that he must rely upon himself, and himself alone, for whatever benefits he is to enjoy; and devote his time and energies to helping himself and his fellow men to meet the exigencies of life and to set about to solve the difficult and intricate problems of living.
The recognition of a problem is the first step to its solution - We are not "fallen" angels, nor were we "created" perfect.
On the contrary, we are the product of millions of years of an unpurposed evolution. We are the descendants and inheritors of all the defects of our primitive ancestry - the evolution of the myriad forms of life from the infinitesimal to the mammoth - from the worm to the dinosaur. ~ Joseph Lewis

Neither myths nor mysteries can hold a candle to the most infinitesimal spark of hope. ~ N.K. Jemisin

It was this whole huge deal," Megan said. "But then we re-voted and I won! I still can't believe it."
"Well, congratulations," Finn said.
"Thanks. I couldn't wait t tell you," Megan said, grinning at him. "You should have seen her face. It was like…"
Megan stopped suddenly--Finn's face had gone all weird. He wasn't smiling anymore. It seemed like he had stopped breathing.
"What?" Megan said, her heart skipping a beat. He was studying her. Taking in every line of her face from her jaw to her cheekbone to her flyaway hair.
Finn reached over and ran his hand quickly over her hair, brushing it back. "This," he said.
And then he leaned forward and kissed her. For an infinitesimal moment, Megan froze. She had no idea what to do with herself. No idea where to put her hands or whether to move her lips or how to even breathe.
Kiss him back, for God's sake! she told herself.
Then she stifled a surprised, embarrassed, happy laugh and did as she was told. She returned his pressure and reached up to grab awkwardly at his sleeve. Finn's hand cupped the back of her head and his other hand lightly touched her knee. Megan's skin was on fire. Finn was kissing her. Finn was kissing her!
He pulled back, out of nowhere, and looked her in the eyes. "Is this okay?" he asked.
Megan mutely, dumbly, breathlessly nodded. She just wanted his lips on hers. He smiled and kissed her again, and this time Megan slid forward on the bench, leaning her body clo ~ Kate Brian

Once, on a walk by a river- Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow- his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favourite poet. Apparently, not many young women loved Phillip Larkin the way she did. 'If I were to construct a religion/ I should make use of water.' She said she liked the laconic use of 'called in'- as if he would be, as if anyone ever is. They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call, he'd make us of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities- and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true. ~ Ian McEwan

Our memories, too, blend the immediate past with the anticipation of the soon to be, and a living amalgam of these - not some infinitesimal pointlike instant forever fleeing out of reach - is our now. ~ James Gleick

Starting in a hollowed log of wood - some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself 'Why?' and the only echo is 'damned fool!... the Devil drives. ~ Richard Francis Burton

Thought, infinitesimal thought, calm thought, pain.
Later, he asked himself how he had entered the calm. He couldn't talk about it with himself. Only joy at feeling he was in harmony with the words: Later, he ... ~ Maurice Blanchot

The present is an infinitesimal between two infinites. 'Tis a line (a thing without breadth or thickness) moving across the surface of Eternity . The present is no more, by the time you have said, This is present. ~ Henry Harland

I shift, an infinitesimal movement, towards him. It is like the leap from a waterfall. I do not know, until then, what I am going to do. ~ Madeline Miller

I have a peculiar theory about radium, and I believe it is the correct one. I believe that there is some mysterious ray pervading the universe that is fluorescing to it. In other words, that all its energy is not self-constructed but that there is a mysterious something in the atmosphere that scientists have not found that is drawing out those infinitesimal atoms and distributing them forcefully and indestructibly. ~ Thomas A. Edison

Newton had invented the calculus, which was expressed in the language of "differential equations," which describe how objects smoothly undergo infinitesimal changes in space and time. The motion of ocean waves, fluids, gases, and cannon balls could all be expressed in the language of differential equations. Maxwell set out with a clear goal, to express the revolutionary findings of Faraday and his force fields through precise differential equations.

Maxwell began with Faraday's discovery that electric fields could turn into magnetic fields and vice versa. He took Faraday's depictions of force fields and rewrote them in the precise language of differential equations, producing one of the most important series of equations in modern science. They are a series of eight fierce-looking differential equations. Every physicist and engineer in the world has to sweat over them when mastering electromagnetism in graduate school.

Next, Maxwell asked himself the fateful question: if magnetic fields can turn into electric fields and vice versa, what happens if they are constantly turning into each other in a never-ending pattern? Maxwell found that these electric-magnetic fields would create a wave, much like an ocean wave. To his astonishment, he calculated the speed of these waves and found it to be the speed of light! In 1864, upon discovering this fact, he wrote prophetically: "This velocity is so nearly that of light that it seems we have strong reason to conclu ~ Michio Kaku

Every child can remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

granted equal knowledge, are there great generals as there are great surgeons, who, when the symptoms exhibited by two cases of illness are identical to the outward eye, nevertheless feel, for some infinitesimal reason, founded perhaps on their experience, but interpreted afresh, that in one case they ought to do this, in another case that; that in one case it is better to operate, in another to wait? ~ Marcel Proust

Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche. ~ C. G. Jung

The moment I took hold of the line, I felt the mighty tug of the wind coursing into my palm and wrist, and there I stayed, transfixed. The pwer in that topgallant sail suddenly awed me, and yet it was among the smaller sails on the mast. It was a mere speck on the ocean, catching an infinitesimal fraction of all the howling winds that crossed the wide seas. I literally could not move a muscle, trying in vain to absorb the magnitude of it.
And there was something else, as well. This wind was blowing me westward. I was hurtling into my own predestined future. With neither star nor compass, I knew the heading of this wind. It bore down on a lonely river crossing in one of the last wild places on Earth, where timber moaned in a gale, and frosty grass sparkled in the dawn, and beasts lumbered and thundered the valley. A sacred place protected by Comanches. ~ Mike Blakely

No one thing shows the greatness and power of the human intellect or the loftiness and nobility of man more than his ability to know and to understand fully and feel strongly his own smallness. When, in considering the multiplicity of worlds, he feels himself to be an infinitesimal part of a globe which itself is a negligible part of one of the infinite number of systems that go to make up the world, and in considering this is astonished by his own smallness, and in feeling it deeply and regarding it intently, virtually blends into nothing, and it is as if he loses himself in the immensity of things, and finds himself as though lost in the incomprehensible vastness of existence, with this single act of thought he gives the greatest possible proof of the nobility and immense capability of his own mind, which, enclosed in such a small and negligible being, has nonetheless managed to know and understand things so superior to his own nature, and to embrace and contain this same intensity of existence and things in his thought. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

Whereas I think: I'm lying here in a haystack ... The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don't occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I'm fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven't existed and won't exist ... And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something ... What chaos! What a farce! ~ Ivan Turgenev

Words are really a mask,' he said. 'They rarely express the true meaning; in fact they tend to hide it. If you can live in fantasy, then you don't need religion, since with fantasy you can understand that after death, man is reincorporated in the Universe. Once again I will say that it is not important to know whether there is something beyond this life. What counts is having done the right sort of work; if that is right, then everything else will be all right. The Universe, or Nature, is for me what God is for others. It is wrong to think that Nature is the enemy of man, something to be conquered. Rather, we should look upon Nature as a mother, and should peaceably surrender ourselves to it. If we take that attitude, we will simply feel that we are returning to the Universe as all other things do, all animals and plants. We are all just infinitesimal parts of the Whole. It is absurd to rebel; we must deliver ourselves up to the great current ... ~ Miguel Serrano

You know that, according to quantum theory, if two particles collide with enough energy you can, in principle, with an infinitesimal probability, produce two grand pianos. ~ Isidor Isaac Rabi

THE SUN CAME UP a baleful smear in the sky, not quite shapeless, in fact able to assume the appearance of a device immediately recognizable yet unnamable, so widely familiar that the inability to name it passed from simple frustration to a felt dread, whose intricacy deepened almost moment to moment . . . its name a word of power, not to be spoken aloud, not even to be remembered in silence. All around lay ambushes of the bad ice, latent presences, haunting all transaction, each like the infinitesimal circle converging toward zero that mathematicians now and then find use for. A silver-gray, odorless, silent exit from the upper world. . . . The sun might be visible from time to time, with or without clouds, but the sky was more neutral-density gray than blue. Out on the promontory grew some even-textured foliage, in this light a blazing, virtually shadowless green, and breaking down at the base of the headland was the sea-green sea, the ice-green, glass-green sea. Hunter ~ Thomas Pynchon

Mackenzie watched the universe end. It was beautiful, like a flower closing up for the night. Stars and planets swirled inwards, spiralling around and down, faster and faster, collapsing into an infinitesimal particle. As silent as the sunset. The more space/time that was pulled in, the more massive the particle became and the more gravity it exerted on what remained of the universe. ~ Simon Kewin

Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness. The trouble is that the expansion has to be made at the roots, not at the branches, and that's what makes it hard to see. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

I suppose that was an example of close attention to detail that is common to writers and artists. It is imperative, whether consciously or not, that one observe the vast as well as the infinitesimal in order to create the image or choose accurate words that ring true. ~ Elizabeth Winder

Nothing ever really happens, you know. Life is infinitesimal and incremental and inconsequential. ~ Sherman Alexie

If only we could reach back before the concept, could write on a level with the senses, record the infinitesimal variations of what we touch, do what a reptile would do if it were to set about writing! ~ Emil M. Cioran

Her outflung hand turned over in the air. The gesture it described was infinitesimal, but it made Corrie draw in his breath and for the first time consider the possibility that perhaps the final emotion he might feel for his wife was hate. -Life Sentence ~ Rebecca West

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

Do you know the amount of evil done by well-meaning humans? Oodles. Do you know the amount done by ill-meaning devils? Infinitesimal. ~ Thomm Quackenbush

You'd think there'd be some kind of more dramatic mental event associated with updating on an observation of infinitesimal probability -" Harry stopped himself. Mum, the witch, and even his Dad were giving him that look again. "I mean, with finding out that everything I believe is false. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. ~ Willa Cather

The key question of time travel," my father says, "is this: How do we know what it means to perceive an event as presently occurring, rather than as a memory of a past event? How can we tell present from past? And how do we move the infinitesimal window of the present through the viewfinder at such a constant rate? Why can we see a faraway snow-tipped mountain range, or a jet taking off, or the moon, or the sun, or stars, and not an event that took place a moment ago, let alone a month ago, a year, thirty-three years ago? ~ Charles Yu

Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, ~ Thomas Carlyle

Lady Thornton!" the prosecutor rapped out, and he began firing questions at her so rapidly that she could scarcely keep track of them. "Tell us the truth, Lady Thornton. Did that man"-his finger pointed accusingly to where Ian was sitting, out of Elizabeth's vision-"fid you and bribe you to come back here and tell us this absurd tale? Or did he find you and threaten your life if you didn't come here today? Isn't it true that you have no idea where your brother is? Isn't it true that by your own admission a few moments ago you fled in terror for your life from this cruel man? Isn't it true that you are afraid of further cruelty from him-"
"No!" Elizabeth cried. Her gaze raced over the male faces around and above her, and she could see not one that looked anything but either dubious or contemptuous of the truths she had told.
"No further questions!"
"Wait!" In that infinitesimal moment of time Elizabeth realized that if she couldn't convince them she was telling the truth, she might be able to convince them she was too stupid to make up such a lie. "Yes, my lord," her voice rang out. "I cannot deny it-about his cruelty, I mean."
Sutherland swung around, his eyes lighting up, and renewed excitement throbbed in the great chamber. "You admit this is a cruel man?"
"Yes, I do," Elizabeth emphatically declared.
"My dear, poor woman, could you tell us-all of us-some examples of his cruelty?"
"Yes, and when I do, I know you will all understand how tru ~ Judith McNaught

We must set limits to our wishes, curb our desires, moderate our anger, always remembering that an individual can attain only an infinitesimal share in anything that is worth having; and that on the other hand, everyone must incur many of the ills of life ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

It's not the theme parks of Paradiso and Inferno that I dread most - the heavenly rides, the hellish crowds - and I could live with the insult of eternal oblivion. I don't even mind not knowing which it will be. What I fear is missing out. Health desire or mere greed, I want my life first, my due, my infinitesimal slice of endless time and one reliable chance of a consciousness. I'm owed a handful of decades to try my luck on a freewheeling planet. That's the ride for me - the Wall of Life. I want my go. I want to become. Put another way, there's a book I want to read, not yet published, not yet written, though a start's been made. I want to read to the end of My History of the Twenty-First Century. I want to be there, on the last page, in my early eighties, frail but sprightly, dancing a jig on the evening of December 31, 2099. ~ Ian McEwan

Though my love for you is infinitesimal, your eyes are as dewey as any old decimal. ~ Elizabeth McCracken

As a rule, in times of joy and elation, one finds God's footsteps in the majesty and grandeur of the cosmos, in its vastness and its stupendous dynamics. When man is drunk with life, when he feels that living is a dignified affair, then man beholds God in infinity. In moments of ecstasy God addresses Himself to man through the twinkling stars and the roar of the endlessly distant heavens:
ברכי נפשי את ד', ד' אלקים, גדלת מאד, הוד והדר לבשת
"O Lord my God Thou are very great, Thou are clothed with glory and majesty."
In such moments, Majestas Dei, which not even the vast universe is large enough to accommodate, addresses itself to happy man.
However, with the arrival of the dark night of the soul, in moments of agony and black despair, when living becomes ugly and absurd; plainly nauseating, when man loses his sense of beauty and majesty, God addresses him, not from infinity but from the infinitesimal, not from the vast stretches of the universe but from a single spot in the darkness which surrounds suffering man, from within the black despair itself...
God, in those moments, appeared not as the exalted, majestic King, but rather as a humble, close friend, brother, father: in such moments of black despair, He was not far from me; He was right there in the dark room; I felt His warm hand, כביכול. on my shoulder, I hugged His knees, כביכול. He was with me in the narrow confines of a small room, taking up no space at all. God's abiding in a fenced-in fini ~ Joseph B. Soloveitchik

Our infinitesimal hopes should survive longer than our vast disappointments ~ Munia Khan

Specificity refers to the ability of any medicine to discriminate between its intended target and its host. Killing a cancer cell in a test tube is not a particularly difficult task: the chemical world is packed with malevolent poisons that, even in infinitesimal quantities, can dispatch a cancer cell within minutes. The trouble lies in finding a selective poison - a drug that will kill cancer without annihilating the patient. Systemic therapy without specificity is an indiscriminate bomb. For an anticancer poison to become a useful drug, Meyer knew, it needed to be a fantastically nimble knife: sharp enough to kill cancer yet selective enough to spare the patient. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

And that's when he saw, at last, why it was so sweet to be infinitesimal: because as we become nothing, beneath the stars, so too do our troubles. ~ Anthony McCarten

It is going to be necessary that everything that happens in a finite volume of space and time would have to be analyzable with a finite number of logical operations. The present theory of physics is not that way, apparently. It allows space to go down into infinitesimal distances, wavelengths to get infinitely great, terms to be summed in infinite order, and so forth; and therefore, if this proposition [that physics is computer-simulatable] is right, physical law is wrong. ~ Richard P. Feynman

Writers and musicians are very similar in that the chances of making a life in either field are so infinitesimal. And once you're in, the chances of staying viable are difficult. But there is something incredibly different about performing in front of a live audience, as opposed to sitting at your desk typing. ~ Stacey D'Erasmo

The butterfly effect deals in the tendency of infinitesimal variations to amplify over time. ""You never play around with history, because the change you thought you were making for the better is likely to cause so many unforeseen ripples that it may well add up to a net loss. Too many variables to control the outcome. ~ Erika Johansen

In the dead of night, his keen senses suddenly focused on the entry door. An infinitesimal sound of metal pierced the silence in the hallway. Immediately, Sharko turned off the light and grabbed up his Sig. Here they were. Beneath his door, he saw, very briefly, the beam of a flashlight, before everything went black again. His jaw set, he slowly got up from his chair and crept toward the living room. On the other side, the linoleum floor creaked slightly. Sharko felt the edge of his sofa and crouched down, his gun aimed blindly in front of him. He could have attacked from the front, by surprise, but he didn't know how many there were. One thing was for sure: they rarely went out alone. ~ Franck Thilliez

It's brown." So maybe I had the teeniest, tiniest, most infinitesimal amount of auburn in my hair. I was still a brunette. "It's the lighting," I said.
"Yeah, maybe it's the lightbulbs." His smile brought up both sides of his mouth, and a dimple surfaced. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick

At any time in history, gazillions of lives are being lived simultaneously. In Zimbabwe, Thailand, Tasmania, and Borneo, in the poorest hovel and the richest palace, in the sky and on the moon, the lives of ants, plants, gorillas, and people are going on. But we are generally fixated on that infinitesimal thing in the scope of the universe, ourselves. ~ Kelly Easton

I'm very excited about dance and love it with a deep passion. I also struggle, tire and become discouraged. But what has always revived me ... has been the rebirth of energy each time the creative process is awakened and artistic activity begins to unfold even in some infinitesimal measure. ~ Anna Halprin

It happened very fast. And now that he's dead he can't remember pain. It's as if he'd never existed.'
He wanted her to believe this, but he wasn't sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Well for the drones of the social hive that there are bees of an industrious turn, willing, for an infinitesimal share of the honey, to undertake the labor of its fabrication. ~ Thomas Hood

How does it feel to be a part of this beautifully ingenious design. I have faith that there is a chosen moment in which my soul will expand infinitely free from time and space. Some may find that foolish but I have reasons for my beliefs that are uniquely my own. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies making up the universe. Earth is only one planet of billions orbiting inside just one of these 500,000 billion or more galaxies. And I myself am one person. One of over seven billion people living on our dynamic little planet. Instead of being diluted by this infinitesimal proportion I accept it as a challenge and I use science to strengthen my spirituality. It provokes curiosity and redefines my view of logical thinking. I believe that existence is based on the exchange of energy and functionality. Energy is expended to carry out varying tasks ensuring the function of an organism. This is evident in every life form and has been the founding principle supporting lifetimes of discoveries. Energy is spent with purpose. I can't help but draw the conclusion that the energy required to create the universe itself was done so for a purpose. You and I were created with a purpose. -Tavia Rahki Smith ~ Tavia Rahki Smith

It is not only impolitic and injudicious to even attempt to think ouside a box with a linearly skewed, acutely constrained and partial view. I would rather choose to think iside an infinitesimal pinfold but in 3D. ~ John Onyango Agumba

Infinitesimal Dust

What is the light in the center of the darkness
inside your soul? A royal radiance
or a fantasy like the way the full moon
comes up sometimes in daylight?

But this is the sun itself,
Shams and a truth prior to the soul.

Human beings cannot endure such clarity.
We make statues, apply paint,
and use words with hidden allusions.

When the eye that has seen Shams
turns to look somewhere else,
what does it see?

In the love-ocean clothes are an embarrassment.
Don't look to be famous here,
and don't expect payment.

An east wind bringing infinitesimal dust
from Tabriz is the most I expect. ~ Rumi

Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of which (before the event) was infinitesimal. At the present time we have no legitimate grounds for either asserting or denying that life got off to but a single start on earth, and that, as a consequence, before it appeared its chances of occurring were next to nil ... Destiny is written concurrently with the event, not prior to it ... The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it surprising that, like the person who has just made a million at the casino, we should feel strange and a little unreal? ~ Jacques Monod

There was an infinitesimal pause while he watched her face, as though he half expected her to recognise it, before he went on, 'My friends call me Thorn,' and gave her a smile of such devastating charm that she blinked.
Her hand clasped in his, her senses zinging from his touch and that stunning smile, she stared into his dark, handsome face until, realising that she was gawking at him like some overgrown schoolgirl, she withdrew her hand and asked quickly, 'What do your enemies call you? ~ Lee Wilkinson

The tears in my pus-filled eyes became a thousand little crystals of ever color. Like stained-glass windows, I thought. God is with you today, Papi! In the midst of nature's monstrous elements, in the wind, the immenseness of the sea, the depth of the waves, the imposing green roof of the bush, you feel your own infinitesimal smallness, and perhaps it's here, without looking for Him, that you find God, that you touch Him with your finger. I had sensed Him at night during the thousands of hours I had spent buried alive in dank dungeons without a ray of sun; I touched Him today in a sun that would devour everything too weak to resist it. I touched God, I felt Him around me, inside me. He even whispered in my ear: You will suffer; you will suffer more. But this time I am on your side. You will be free. You will, I promise you. ~ Henri Charriere

If smallness was fortune, then I had come across a treasure, infinitesimal and beyond value. I felt lucky. You had to decide what was estimable and precious in your life and set out to find it. The objects you valued defined you. ~ Pat Conroy

Love of God," he said slowly, searching for words, "is not always
the same as love of good, I wish it were that simple. We know what
is good, it is written in the Commandments. But God is not
contained only in the Commandments, you know; they are only an
infinitesimal part of Him. A man may abide by the Commandments
and be far from God. ~ Hermann Hesse

My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the people governed is, on the whole, illimitable. ~ Charles Dickens

As I build sentences, I roll them sometimes on my mouth to taste them as I write them. I have this emptying of the mind and the focusing on that single thing, that infinitesimal moment and there is perfection, you know, as if I exist fully in that nanosecond of emotion. ~ Trinity Jones

Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. ~ Fred Rogers

In the letters he sends to his friend, Werther recounts both the events of his life and the effects of his passion; but it is literature which governs the mixture. For if I keep a journal, we may doubt that this journal relates, strictly speaking, to events. The events of amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude: "I ran into X, who was with Y" "Today X didn't call me" "X was in a bad mood," etc.: who would see a story in that? The infinitesimal event exists only in its huge reverberation: Journal of my reverberations (of my wounds, my joys, my interpretations, my rationalizations, my impulses): who would understand anything in that? Only the Other could write my love story, my novel. ~ Roland Barthes

Poetry

And it was at that age... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky. ~ Pablo Neruda

The sun sliced through the windshield, sealing me in light. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth on my eyelids. Sunlight traveled a long distance to reach this planet; an infinitesimal portion of that sunlight was enough to warm my eyelids. I was moved. That something as insignificant as an eyelid had its place in the workings on the universe, that the cosmic order did not overlook this momentary fact. ~ Haruki Murakami

Man is a little world--a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a fetus, he is suspended, by all his three spirits, in the matrix of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with the sidereal anima mundi. He is in it, as it is in him, for the world-pervading element fills all space, and is space itself, only shoreless and infinite. As to his third spirit, the divine, what is it but an infinitesimal ray, one of the countless radiations proceeding directly from the Highest Cause--the Spiritual Light of the World? This is the trinity of organic and inorganic nature--the spiritual and the physical, which are three in one, and of which Proclus says that 'The first monad is the Eternal God; the second, eternity; the third, the paradigm, or pattern of the universe;' the three constituting the Intelligible Triad. ~ Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

But spring in England is like a prolonged adolescence, stumbling, sweet and slow, a thing of infinitesimal shades, false starts, expectations, deferred hopes, and final showers of glory. ~ Laurie Lee

Apart from the agglomeration of huge masses in which the individual disappears anyway, one of the chief factors responsible for psychological mass-mindedness is scientific rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity. As a social unit he has lost his individuality and become a mere abstract number in the bureau of statistics. He can only play the role of an interchangeable unit of infinitesimal importance. Looked at rationally and from outside, that is exactly what he is, and from this point of view it seems positively absurd to go on talking about the value or meaning of the individual. ~ C. G. Jung

Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist. ~ Bill Bryson

Ask yourself whether our language is complete
whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The chances in some cases are infinitesimal, but the potential is still there. This is about all that patients need to know and it is about all that patients want to know. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

It hit me very early on that something was terribly wrong, that I would see silos full of food and supermarkets full of food, and kids starving ... In Fair Trade, we see ourselves as this infinitesimal part of the world economy. But somebody's got to come up with an alternative model that says children eating is No. 1. ~ Medea Benjamin

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality. ~ Rabih Alameddine