Quotes About Friction

“Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile.”

— Nathanael West

“His voice goads me and then I register the perfect rhythm he is creating in my tightly wound body. One, two, and then three fingers fill me, his hand rocking flawlessly against my quivering clitoris as he fucks me. Slowly at first and then the tempo increases as Shaw builds the pace. Before I know it I am panting as the sensations consume me. Eyes shut tight, I feel myself grinding against what feels like the palm of his hand or maybe his wrist, loving the friction it creates as Shaw penetrates me over and over again.”

— Felicity Brandon

“Pip winds his arms up around Lindsay's neck and kisses him back, and this time
he's the one to close his eyes and escape into darkness so there's nothing in the world except the soft curls under his
fingers and the touch of Lindsay's breath on his mouth and the slow, sliding friction.
"Lindsay, do you still hate me?"
"I do when I remember to," Lindsay says quietly, but he doesn't stop moving and he doesn't stop kissing him for a long time, on his trembling mouth and his sweaty forehead and his wet, closed eyes.”

— Richard Rider

“The spiritual efficacy of all encounters is determined by the amount of personal ego that is in play. If two people meet and disagree fiercely about theological matters but agree, silently or otherwise, that God's love creates and sustains human love, and that whatever else may be said of God is subsidiary to this truth, then even out of what seems great friction there may emerge a peace that-though it may not end the dispute, though neither party may be "convinced" of the other's position-nevertheless enters and nourishes one's notion of, and relationship with, God. Without this radical openness, all arguments about God are not simply pointless but pernicious, for each person is in thrall to some lesser conception of ultimate truth and asserts not love but a lesson, not God but himself.”

— Christian Wiman

“The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.”

— Confucius

“Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.”

— Andrei Tarkovsky

“People spent their lives searching for something beyond the simple friction of skin on skin, but there was nothing. The void between two people could never be closed, and in trying to close it, they would only learn everything that was to be despised in the other.”

— Maggie Shipstead

“She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.”

— Orson Scott Card

“Every individual should, by nature, have his extraordinary points. But nowadays, you may look for them with a microscope, they are so worn-down by the regular machine-friction of our average and mechanical days.”

— D.H. Lawrence

“To a social animal, trust is like lubrication. It reduces friction and creates conditions much more conducive to performance,”

— Simon Sinek

“Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.”

— Saul Alinsky

“It's not the work which kills people, it's the worry. It's not the revolution that destroys machinery it's the friction.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“Heat can also be produced by the impact of imperfectly elastic bodies as well as by friction. This is the case, for instance, when we produce fire by striking flint against steel, or when an iron bar is worked for some time by powerful blows of the hammer.”

— Hermann Von Helmholtz

“Every friendship goes through ups and downs. Dysfunctional patterns set in; external situations cause internal friction; you grow apart and then bounce back together.”

— Mariella Frostrup

“So, these political activities will create friction in and of themselves, and in this environment of friction there'll be additional violence.”

— John Abizaid

“If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction.”

— Pankaj Mishra

“Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance.”

— Mark Helprin

“I wonder what my baby is thinking at this moment, he called, rubbing his stomach with his hands. What I was thinking about was whether or not his being my mother was going to wreck my nightly friction ritual.”

— Wally Lamb

“Bitcoin woke us all up to a new way to pay, and culturally, I think a much larger percentage of us have become accustomed to the idea that money no longer comes with the friction it once had.”

— John Battelle

“Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.”

— George Eliot

“On a good day, I view the job [of president] as directing an orchestra. On the dark days, it is more like that of a clutch
engaging the engine to effect forward motion, while taking greater friction.”

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

“Learning the edges or limits or sources of friction in empathy was one of the big issues for me.”

— Leslie Jamison

“I tried to break her before. Now, I just wanted her as she was. I wanted every last beautiful flaw. I wanted the witty one-liners and the coldness that only I knew how to warm. I wanted the fight and the friction and the make-up sex. I wanted her to wake up in my bed every morning. I wanted her shitty cooking and her beautiful, complex mind.”

— Tarryn Fisher

“I tensed, waiting for the fury - both his and mine - but it was only quiet and calm in the darkness of his room. I could almost taste the sweetness of reunion in the air, a separate fragrance from the perfume of his breath; the emptiness when we were apart left its own bitter aftertaste, something I didn't consciously notice until it was removed.
There was no friction in the space between us. The stillness was peaceful - not like the calm before the tempest, but like a clear night untouched by even the dream of a storm.”

— Stephenie Meyer

“Hawaiian to me is a feeling of getting somewhere, without stepping on anybodys toes, without causing friction with anybody.”

— Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

“In family life, love is the oil that eases friction, the cement that binds closer together, and the music that brings harmony.”

— Eva Burrows

“Obviously you take any creative people and put them in a room and you're going to get clashes, you're going to get friction.”

— Roger Glover

“The reason the lawyers lead the line to the guillotine or the firing squad is that, while law is supposed to be a device to serve society, a civilized way of helping the wheels go round without too much friction, it is pretty hard to find a group less concerned with serving society and more concerned with serving themselves than the lawyers.”

— Fred Rodell

“I'm definitely one of those people that what comes into my head falls out of my mouth. That's a way for me to be even more creative, to sort of get the ball rolling and start parlaying off of somebody and interacting. That charge or that friction sometimes - if it's positive or negative - is inspiring, and it gets people to be I think creative, maybe.”

— Giovanni Ribisi

“Of all the frictional resistances, the one that most retards human movement is ignorance, what Buddha called 'the greatest evil in the world.' The friction which results from ignorance ... can be reduced only by the spread of knowledge and the unification of the heterogeneous elements of humanity. No effort could be better spent.”

— Nikola Tesla

“The Federal Government is rendered weak to do wrong, and powerful to do right: for, as soon as it begins to go wrong, it naturally begins to be divided against itself, and the three great wheels of its machinery exhaust their momentum, or wear each other out, in their friction against each other; while, as soon as it begins to go right, all the parts work harmoniously, and exhaust their full strength on the object of their action.”

— William Batchelder Greene

“An inability to communicate has little to do with international friction-as is seen in the special ferocity of wars fought between people who speak the same language.”

— Peter Farb

“I think LPGA players for a long time were afraid to say what's on their minds. But we're doing all the right things and there's nothing wrong with having some great personalities and rivalries and some friction. I think that's really good for the sport.”

— Cristie Kerr

“As a dramatist, you're looking for points of friction ...”

— Aaron Sorkin

“Then, there's the modern mother-in-law. In her mid 40s, she is the compact car of her breed: efficient, trim, attractive and in harmony with her times. She's pretty stiff competition for the plain young matron who's overweight and under-financed. If there is going to be friction in this relationship, it could start from envy and resentment in the younger woman. But Father Time is on her side, even if Mother Nature played her a dirty trick”

— Abigail Van Buren

“All polishing is done by friction,”

— Mary Parker Follett

“FIDDLE, n. An instrument to tickle human ears by friction of a horse's tail on the entrails of a cat.”

— Ambrose Bierce

“If you want to be a real entrepreneur you have to be the cause, you have to be the creator of someone else's new realty. Which eliminates time, space, motion, and friction.”

— Ashton Kutcher

“The Internet will help achieve "friction free capitalism" by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other.”

— Bill Gates

“Without culture there can be no growth; without exertion, no acquisition; without friction, no polish; without labor, no knowledge; without action, no progress; and without conflict, no victory. The man who lies down a fool at night, hoping that he will waken wise in the morning, will rise up in the morning as he laid down in the evening.”

— Frederick Douglass

“If the resources of different nations are treated as exclusive properties of these nations as wholes, if international economic relations, instead of being relations between individuals, become increasingly relations between whole nations organized as trading bodies, they inevitably become the source of friction and envy between whole nations.”

— Friedrich August Von Hayek

“It is one of the most fatal illusions that, by substituting negotiations between states or organized groups for competition for markets or for raw materials, international friction would be reduced. This would merely put a contest of force in the place of what can only metaphorically be called the "struggle" of competition and would transfer to powerful and armed states, subject to no superior law, the rivalries which between individuals had to be decided without recourse to force.”

— Friedrich August Von Hayek

“We have nearly complete misunderstanding between people of different faiths in Lake Wobegon, and that's probably one reason why we get along so very well. It's when you are trying to convince another person to think the same way that you do that there is friction and trouble between people. But when you feel that the other person is dumber than dirt, too dumb for words - why waste your breath - you get along pretty well. There's no bond between people that's quite so strong as when people each feel slightly superior towards the other one.”

— Garrison Keillor

“Nobody can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure time for freedom than unconventionality does.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper ...”

— Carl Von Clausewitz

“If you take the conflicts we are used to dealing with, race over the years in America, and you combine that with the desire or aspiration to political power or taking power from other people, which is what politics is all about, you end up with a lot more friction than you would normally see with just straight-ahead politics.”

— Gwen Ifill

“What is it about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it? ... The thing man wanted to invent, but never did ... If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It is a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledygook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.”

— Ray Bradbury

“Consider the impasse of a one God universe.
He is all-knowing and all-powerful.
He can't go anywhere since He is already everywhere.
He can't do anything since the act of doing presupposes opposition.
His universe is irrevocably thermodynamic having no friction by definition. So, He has to create friction: War, Fear, Sickness, Death,
To keep his dying show on the road.”

— William S. Burroughs

“Blessed are the happiness-makers! Blessed are they that take away attritions, that remove friction, that make the courses of life smooth, and the intercourse of men gentle!”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“I'm interested in that hybrid - the place between the real world and my imagination. There's a friction that's created between the things we imagine and the things that exist.”

— Laurel Nakadate