The Pendulum Quotes

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 ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I was this little blond girl with a guitar case bigger than me - it was pink and sparkly at the time. But I always took myself seriously, and I think that people took that seriously. I would tell them about my goal list, and they listened. I was like, 'I want to be the one that swings the pendulum.' ~ Kelsea Ballerini

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

In prison, I finally got it. Understood that just like three black men were gangbangers, and three Jews a conspiracy, three Muslims had become a sleeper cell. And later, much later, the pendulum would swing back, and everybody would celebrate progress, the storied tradition of accommodation, on TV talk shows and posters in middle schools. There would be ceremonies, public apologies, cardboard displays. In the interim, however, I threatened order, threatened civilization. In the interim, I too had to adhere to an unwritten code. ~ H M Naqvi

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. ~ Paul Davies

The observations, so numerous and so important, of the pendulum as object are especially relevant to the length of its oscillations. Those that I propose to make known to the [Paris] Academy [of Sciences] are principally addressed to the direction of the plane of its oscillation, which, moving gradually from east to west, provides evidence to the senses of the diurnal movement of the terrestrial globe. ~ Leon Foucault

It takes the better part of those months for Herr Thiessen to complete the clock. He works on little else, though the sum of money involved makes the arrangement more than manageable. Weeks are spent on the design and the mechanics. He hires an assistant to complete some of the basic woodwork, but he takes care of all the details himself. Herr Thiessen loves details and he loves a challenge. He balances the entire design on that one specific word Mr. Barris used. Dreamlike.
The finished clock is resplendent. At first glance it is simply a clock, a rather large black clock with a white face and a silver pendulum. Well crafted, obviously, with intricately carved woodwork edges and a perfectly painted face, but just a clock.
But that is before it is wound. Before it begins to tick, the pendulum swinging steadily and evenly. Then, then it becomes something else.
The changes are slow. First, the color changes in the face, shifts from white to grey, and then there are clouds that float across it, disappearing when they reach the opposite side.
Meanwhile, bits of the body of the clock expand and contract, like pieces of a puzzle. As thought clock is falling apart, slowly and gracefully.
All of this takes hours.
The face of the clock becomes a darker grey, and then black, with twinkling stars where the numbers had been previously. The body of the clock, which has been methodically turning itself inside out and expanding, is now entirely subtle sha ~ Erin Morgenstern

During the first World War women in the United States had a chance to try their capacities in wider fields of executive leadershipin industry. Must we always wait for war to give us opportunity? And must the pendulum always swing back in the busy world of work and workers during times of peace? ~ Mary Barnett Gilson

Wherever you put it, Foucault's Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it. ~ Umberto Eco

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. ~ Justus Von Liebig

In death - no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

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'. ~ Jean Bernard Leon Foucault

I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy. ~ Gillian Flynn

The "mood of the nation," in 1972, was so overwhelmingly vengeful, greedy, bigoted, and blindly reactionary that no presidential candidate who even faintly reminded "typical voters" of the fear & anxiety they'd felt during the constant "social upheavals" of the 1960s had any chance at all of beating Nixon last year--not even Ted Kennedy--because the pendulum "effect" that began with Nixon's slim victory in '68 was totally irreversible by 1972. After a decade of left-bent chaos, the Silent Majority was so deep in a behavorial sink that their only feeling for politics was a powerful sense of revulsion. All they wanted in the White House was a man who would leave them alone and do anything necessary to bring calmness back into their lives ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Women should not be penalized for being women. Equally, men should not be penalized for being men. I fear that in overly politically correct western Christian democracies, the latter is occurring. It should not be forgotten that nature will correct the pendulum, so that is does not swing too far either way. ~ Robert Black

Men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Now it is as if she can hear the pendulum in the air in front of her: that huge golden bob, as wide across as a barrel, swinging on and on, never stopping. Grooving and regrooving its inhuman truth into the floor. ~ Anthony Doerr

You're innocent, Casaubon. You ran away instead of throwing stones, you got your degree, you didn't shoot anybody. Yet a few years ago I felt you, too, were blackmailing me. Nothing personal, just generational cycles. And then last year, when I saw the Pendulum, I understood everything."

"Everything?"

"Almost everything. You see, Casaubon, even the Pendulum is a false prophet. You look at it, you think it's the only fixed point in the cosmos. but if you detach it from the ceiling of the Conservatoire and hang it in a brothel, it works just the same. And there are other pendulums: there's one in New York, in the UN building, there's one in the science museum in San Francisco, and God knows how many others. Wherever you put it, Foucault's Pendulum swings from a motionless point while the earth rotates beneath it. Every point of the universe is a fixed point: all you have to do is hang the Pendulum from it."

"God is everywhere."

"In a sense, yes. That's why the Pendulum disturbs me. It promises the infinite, but where to put the infinite is left to me. So it isn't enough to worship the Pendulum; you still have to make a decision, you have to find the best point for it. And yet..."

"And yet?"

"And yet... You're not taking me seriously by any chance, are you, Casaubon? No, I can rest easy; we're not the type to take things seriously.... Well, as I was saying, the feeling you have is that you've spent a lifetime hang ~ Umberto Eco

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

Until recently, the question was 'Why can't a woman be more like a man?' It should have been changed to 'Why can't both sexes be more like the best parts of each other?' Instead, the pendulum swung to the 1960s feminist lapel button Adam Was a First Draft. True enough. So are we all. ~ Warren Farrell

Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to suit the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow. ~ Man Ray

The importance of this will be appreciated by any thinking person who realizes what creatures of moods, feelings and emotion the majority of people are, and how little mastery of themselves they manifest. If you will stop and consider a moment, you will realize how much these swings of Rhythm have affected you in your life - how a period of Enthusiasm has been invariably followed by an opposite feeling and mood of Depression. Likewise, your moods and periods of Courage have been succeeded by equal moods of Fear. And so it has ever been with the majority of persons - tides of feeling have ever risen and fallen with them, but they have never suspected the cause or reason of the mental phenomena. An understanding of the workings of this Principle will give one the key to the Mastery of these rhythmic swings of feeling, and will enable him to know himself better and to avoid being carried away by these inflows and outflows. The Will is superior to the conscious manifestation of this Principle, although the Principle itself can never be destroyed. We may escape its effects, but the Principle operates, nevertheless. The pendulum ever swings, although we may escape being carried along with it. ~ Three Initiates

I'm not so sure that the conventional wisdom makes any sense. Yes, it might be technically easy to track people and all that. But in the long-term I'm optimistic that we'll see the pendulum swing back in the other direction towards more privacy. ~ Rod Humble

Maybe children just want whatever it is they don't get. And then they grow up and give their children what they wanted, be it silence or information, affection or independence
so that child, in turn, craves something else. With every generation the pendulum swings from opposite to opposite, stillness and peace so elusive. ~ Laura Moriarty

The pendulum had swung too far, as always, and now was swinging back, and the horror of intolerance had been loosed upon the land. ~ Clifford D. Simak

His cock swung from side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock on speed. ~ Stephen King

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data-processing. Democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given twentieth-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all the information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.

"However, soon AI might swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. Indeed, AI might make centralised systems far more efficient than diffused systems, because machine learning works better the more information it can analyse. If you concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, disregarding all privacy concerns, you can train much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. For example, if an authoritarian government orders all its citizens to have their DNA scanned and to share all their medical data with some central authority, it would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over soci ~ Yuval Noah Harari

They say, the sun brings life to the world. The sun will rise and look is it not a corpse? Everything is dead and there are corpses everywhere. Just people and around them silence__that is the world! "Love one another"__who said that? Whose command is that? The pendulum swings unfeelingly, antagonistically. It's two o'clock at night. Her slippers are standing by her bed, as if waiting for her ... No, seriously, when they take her away tomorrow, what shall I do? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What is most mortifying of all is that it is chance - simply a barbarous, lagging chance. That is what is mortifying! Five minutes, only five minutes too late! Had I come five minutes earlier, the moment would have passed away like a cloud, and it would never have entered her head again. And it would have ended by her understanding it all. But now again empty rooms, and me alone. Here the pendulum is ticking; it does not care, it has no pity... There is no one - that's the misery of it! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the "upper ten" that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation. She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock. ~ Gustave Flaubert

In the shortest sea voyage there is no sense of time. You have been down in the cabin for hours or days or years. Nobody knows or cares. You know all the people to the point of indifference. You do not believe in dry land any more - you are caught in the pendulum itself, and left there, idly swinging. ~ Katherine Mansfield

Those menacing prehistoric birds of wire and rotting canvas loomed over me, evil dragonflies that some secret power had hung from the ceiling of the nave. I saw them as sapiential metaphors, far more meaningful than their didactic pretext. A swarm of Jurassic insects and reptiles, allegory of the long terrestrial migrations the Pendulum was tracing, aimed at me like angry archons with their long archeopterix-beaks ~ Umberto Eco

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. ~ Terry Pratchett

I knew the earth was rotating, and I with it, and Saint-Martin-des-Champs and all Paris with me, and that together we were rotating beneath the Pendulum, whose own plane never changed direction, because up there, along the infinite extrapolation of its wire beyond the choir ceiling, up toward the most distant galaxies, lay the Only Fixed Point in the universe, eternally unmoving. ~ Umberto Eco

I think now we're seeing the pendulum switch back to this idea where conversations are more important, if not more important than documents. ~ Khoi Vinh

THE DEVIL. As far as I went, yes. But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from heaven to hell is an emancipation, every swing from hell to heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion.... ~ George Bernard Shaw

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. ~ C. G. Jung

Amsterdam: Where the pendulum swings from God to a guilder. ~ Jessie Burton

The pendulum has overcorrected from the cruel era of rapping a disobedient child's knuckles with a ruler to
giving every child a trophy for showing up. Every child should have the experience of being loved unconditionally, supported, and encouraged,
but this requires more than a standing ovation every time he or she enters the room. ~ Ramani Durvasula

Actually it is quite devastating to realise how few people ever think at all. They mostly take their ideas from what they are told on the wireless, television, or in the newspapers, from people who are prepared to take a reasonable fee. To suggest anything different makes you tread on many corns of vested interest. No professional pathfinder likes you for doing it. ~ T C Lethbridge, The Power Of The Pendulum

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. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Everything flows out and in; everything has its tides;
all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests
in everything; the measure of the swing to the right,
is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm
compensates ~ Three Initiates

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. ~ Ruta Sepetys

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) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

She had
become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the
air he breathed
necessary but scarcely noticed. ~ O. Henry

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. ~ Richard Rorty

Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic. ~ Ray Bradbury

Intuition is the art of the moment. Intuition is always in the moment, in the here and now. While the intellect always moves like the pendulum of a clock between the memories of the past and the fantasies of the future, intuition is always in the moment, always in the here and now. The more we develop our inner being, the inner source of love and truth, the inner quality of being here and now, the more we also have access to our intuition. ~ Swami Dhyan Giten

A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns. ~ Henry Adams

The pendulum of economic power might well begin to shift from capital back to labor. ~ Stephen S. Roach

Universes are created; reach their extreme low point of materiality; and then begin their upward swing. Suns spring into being, and then their height of power being reached, the process of retrogression begins, and after aeons they become dead masses of matter, awaiting another impulse which starts again their inner energies into activity and a new solar life cycle is begun. And thus it is with all the worlds; they are born, grow and die; only to be reborn. And thus it is with all the things of shape and form; they swing from action to reaction; from birth to death; from activity to inactivity and then back again. Thus it is with all living things; they are born, grow, and die - and then are reborn. So it is with all great movements, philosophies, creeds, fashions, governments, nations, and all else - birth, growth, maturity, decadence, death - and then new-birth. The swing of the pendulum is ever in evidence. ~ Three Initiates

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

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. ~ Jack Nicklaus

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

Cordelia glared at me. 'I expect if someone strapped you to table an swung an axe over your naked quivering flesh like The Pit and the Pendulum, you'd be correcting his grammar'. ~ Victoria Clayton

The pendulum swings between Light and Darkness ~ Brandon Mull

The 1947 best-seller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex urged that spinsters be barred from teaching children on the grounds of "emotional incompetence." It was the ultimate example of the pendulum swinging - instead of prohibiting the employment of married women as teachers, society now wanted marriage to be mandatory. "A great many children have unquestionably been damaged psychologically by the spinster teacher who cannot be an adequate model of a complete woman either for boys or girls," the authors argued. ~ Gail Collins

This is what the Apologists can teach us about the world, culture, and philosophy. The pendulum steadily swings between contempt and wonder. The aim is not compromise between these stances, rather we need both the extremes of the swing simultaneously. Each extreme taken on its own is too confined for Christian teaching, and so: neither unconditional rejection, nor unconditional embrace. ~ Dariusz Karlowicz

Some energies are not as potent. The only way to develop a potent energy is to spend an existence on the earth. There, one can develop a compassionate nature so that when passing onto other dimensions, one can be of help. When one leaves one's earth body one will need to fully understand compassion to be helpful, effective. On earth, you are encapsulated in flesh...No soul is forced into an assignment upon the earth. Instead they go to their 'rightful space'. When you leave the earth you have a lot more power. It won't be ego-based power. Rather it will be beyond ego, beyond good and evil. In fact, 'evil' is just a label as everything is intermixed. The pendulum just appears to swing back and forth."...

"Kuan Yin is showing me a person running with sandbags. She's telling me that when the person finally lets-go of the sandbags, she or he is faster, stronger. Oh. I get it! That's what the earth existence is like. In many ways living on earth is an 'artificial' burden. Once one is free of one's body, they are not only lighter but also stronger, more powerful. I'm reminded of a time when I was a child. I felt so limited. I remember thinking, 'Why can't I just be wherever I want to be and physically not have to walk or use transportation? Why do I have to physically cross the street?'"-Lena Lees ~ Hope Bradford

Yet we keep returning to reason precisely because it occupies the middle place; it is the revisited point on the swing of the pendulum between scepticism and enthusiasm. ~ Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

(It starts with)
One thing, I don't know why
It doesn't even matter how hard you try
Keep that in mind, I designed this rhyme
To explain in due time
All I know
time is a valuable thing
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
Watch it count down to the end of the day
The clock ticks life away
It's so unreal
Didn't look out below
Watch the time go right out the window
Trying to hold on but didn't even know
Wasted it all just to
Watch you go
I kept everything inside and even though I tried, it all fell apart
What it meant to me will eventually be a memory of a time when I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn't even matter
I had to fall
To lose it all
But in the end
It doesn't even matter ~ Linkin Park

The pendulum oscillates between these two terms: Suffering-that opens a window on the real and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom ... that must be considered as the most tolerable because the most durable of human evils. ~ Samuel Beckett

The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Prophecy of Balance (Year of the Cat)

"There must be balance," Source repeated,
"For mankind to flourish on the Earth-Throne he's seated."

His life is a gift from the gods, they created,
And the power to wield choice, but the outcome is weighted.

Seeing the harm and chaos humans manifest,
Wore heavily upon the goodness within their immortal breast.

But the gods disagreed, and two groups they split,
Each one possessing their own talent and wit.

One side fights for freedom of Man's soul,
But the other wants slavery, and Man to control.

So Source cried, "Enough! Now Observers will be sent,
To assist with human minds you've cleverly bent!"

For balance, the pendulum won't sway too far to one side,
And Universal Laws each god must abide.

The gods agreed, but did not stop with their plan,
To influence mankind as much as they can. ~ Kendi Thompson

McConnell writes, "In ten years the pendulum has swung from 'design everything' to 'design nothing.' But the alternative to BDUF [Big Design Up Front] isn't no design up front, it's a Little Design Up Front (LDUF) or Enough Design Up Front (ENUF)." This is a strawman argument. The alternative to designing before implementing is designing after implementing. ~ Kent Beck

Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

if you ever find yourself in a situation where you know the usual course of events, do something surprising – no matter what – something that does not fit into the standard development of events. The pendulum will be extinguished. The thing is, as long as you are acting according to a given scenario, you accept the pendulum's game and give away your energy on that frequency. ~ Vadim Zeland

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. ~ Mo Rocca

Time is a pendulum. Not a river. More akin to what goes around comes around. ~ Ishmael Reed

My heartfelt appreciation goes out to Jan Zwicky, Don McKay, John Barton, Barry Dempster, Carolyn Forché and Elizabeth Philips for their masterful eyes and minds. ~ Leigh Kotsilidis

Like a pendulum my life swung between fairytales and nightmares. ~ K.S. Ruff

Since I was a kid, I always wanted to figure out how to make a bass line that was a pendulum - like, gravity would control it, and then you could make it play different notes. ~ Bjork

People who believe that justice is a pendulum are willing to swing it wildly. ~ George Hammond

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. ~ Tracey Garvis-Graves

Introspect! Is your life moving forward or just moving like a pendulum? -RVM ~ R.v.m.

It [Foucault's Pendulum] can be very comforting for people of my generation, who ate disappointment for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. ~ Umberto Eco