Quotes About The Fourth Dimension

“If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.”

— Harmony Korine

“No one can point to the fourth dimension, yet it is all around us.”

— Rudy Rucker

“The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word 'dimension' because it seems the best way to indicate the manner of our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ. Color transparencies 'come alive' when viewed in three dimensions instead of two. The presence of the added dimension allows us to see much better the actual reality of what has been photographed. In very much the same way, though of course any analogy is condemned to fail, our entrance into the presence of Christ is an entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life. It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world.”

— Alexander Schmemann

“You must form the habit of living in the fourth dimension, "The World of the Wondrous." It is the world where you do not judge by appearances.”

— Florence Scovel Shinn

“Whereas Nature does not admit of more than three dimensions ... it may justly seem very improper to talk of a solid ... drawn into a fourth, fifth, sixth, or further dimension.”

— John Wallis

“No choice recurs. We may get similar choices again, but never that exact one. Hesitation-inaction-is just as irrevocable as action. What the motorist, locked on the one-way road, is to space, we are to the fourth dimension: we truly pass this way but once.”

— Brian Christian

“A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until
"My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience ... "Look, look!" recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead! It must have been mistaken for a deer.”

— Tom Stoppard

“Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.”

— Tom Wolfe

“Real people move, they bear with them the element of time. It is this fourth dimension of people that I try to capture in a photograph.”

— Richard Avedon

“I don't think I'm being harassed by little green stalkers. I don't know what's really going on, but I'd rather try to eliminate all rational excuses before blaming intergalactic monkeys from the fourth dimension who are somehow interested in this really boring town.”

— Thomm Quackenbush

“I have this math teacher, Mr. Allen. He said that when you're a point, all you see is the point. When you're a line, all you see is the line and the point. When you're in three dimensions, you see three dimensions and lines and points. Just because we can't see a fourth dimension doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means we haven't reached it yet.”

— Jodi Picoult

“Kaluza revealed that in a universe with an additional dimension of space, gravity and electromagnetism can both be described in terms of spatial ripples. Gravity ripples through the familiar three spatial dimensions, while electromagnetism ripples through the fourth. An outstanding problem with Kaluza's proposal was to explain why we don't see this fourth spatial dimension. It was here that Klein made his mark by suggesting the resolution explained above: dimensions beyond those we directly experience can elude our senses and our equipment if they're sufficiently small.”

— Brian Greene

“Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“The fourth dimension, he liked to say, encompasses the three dimensions and consequently puts them in their place, that is, it obliterates the dictatorship of the three dimensions and thereby obliterates the three-dimensional world we know and live in. The fourth dimension, he said, is the full richness of the senses and the (capital S) Spirit, it's the (capital E) Eye, in other words the open Eye that obliterates the eyes, which compared to the Eye are just poor orifices of mud, absorbed in contemplation or the equation birth-training-work-death, whereas the Eye sails up the river of philosophy, the river of existence, the (fast-flowing) river of fate. The fourth dimension, he said, was expressible only through music. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“Perfect grammar
persistent, continuous, sustained
is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.”

— Mark Twain

“Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape.”

— Janet Fitch

“Sometimes I wonder," Merlin declared, licking a bit of mustard off his upper lip, "where exactly does the food come from? Is there a fourth dimension where a magic hat goes to fetch it? Or does it simply summon turkeys and bread out of thin air? In which case, what is this sandwich really made of?”

— Soman Chainani

“As we divest ourselves of once familiar physical objects - digitize and dematerialize - we approach a 'Star Trek' future in which everything can be accessed from the fourth dimension with a few clicks or terse audibles.”

— James Wolcott

“There was evidently no time to be lost, so, hastily adopting the Fourth dimension of Space as a means of escape, he vanished through the wainscoting, and the house became quite quiet.”

— Oscar Wilde

“The word is my fourth dimension.”

— Clarice Lispector

“Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.”

— D.H. Lawrence

“The past is not lost. An image from years ago remained present somewhere in the fourth dimension and it reached you just in that moment.”

— Isaac Bashevis Singer

“An event is a stretch of time, and time, according to physicists, is a continuous variable-an inexorable cosmic flow, in Newton's world, or a fourth dimension in a seamless hyperspace, in Einstein's. But the human mind carves this fabric into the discrete swatches we call events.”

— Steven Pinker

“The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“You, Yunior, have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain't a day that passes that you don't want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after-school special.”

— Junot Díaz

“It is absurd to say that mathematicians have not discovered the fourth dimension.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

“Cinema is a technologically mediated dreamspace, a way to access, a portal to the numinous that unfolded in the fourth dimension, so cinema became sort of a waking dream where we can travel in space and time, where we can travel in mind. This became more than virtual reality, this became a real virtuality ...”

— Jason Silva

“The 4D style, or cosmic comics and relativistic humor, is based on Einstein's theory of relativity which I came up with 20 years ago. 4D works use the idea of the fourth dimension, time, playing on such surrealistic and amazing subjects as motion relativity, space curvature and time dilation.”

— Javad Alizadeh

“Film is a two dimensional thing - it goes up and down and left to right but if you put that music into that two dimensional medium, it became like a third, fourth, and fifth dimension, I really believe in that.”

— Fatih Ak?n

“If Balanchine had any secret, it was one that has endured through two hundred years of classical ballet. It is that dancing correctly in three dimensions, on the music, creates the fourth dimension of meaning.”

— Arlene Croce

“One thing is sure - we have to transform the three-dimensional world of objects into the two-dimensional world of the canvas ... To transform three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking.”

— Max Beckmann

“The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scholars no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been lead quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term fourth dimension.”

— Guillaume Apollinaire

“It's, it's like I'm in the fourth dimension and somebody is asking me to describe it verbally and that's what the fourth dimension is all about, is no words, no symbols, no images, all pure, real energy and vibrations. And, and if I thought about how cruel of a world this is, I would probably just commit suicide after a while, if that was what I spent my energy thinking about. I would definitely not have any strength left to create music.”

— John Frusciante

“I can also be very happy in this life, but it's usually happiness that I get from other lives I've lived and other dimensions. This life is hardly important to me. It's very small compared to the importance that I think the fourth and fifth dimension have. Those places are much more real to me, like when you have a dream and it's more real to you than real life. Compared to where I'll be going, this life seems like a dream that just feels like a dream.”

— John Frusciante

“I have read various articles on the fourth dimension, the relativity theory of Einstein, and other psychological speculation on the constitution of the universe; and after reading them I feel as Senator Brandegee felt after a celebrated dinner in Washington. "I feel," he said, "as if I had been wandering with Alice in Wonderland and had tea with the Mad Hatter."”

— Charles Lane Poor

“An attempt at visualizing the Fourth Dimension: Take a point, stretch it into a line, curl it into a circle, twist it into a sphere, and punch through the sphere.”

— Albert Einstein

“To express dynamic motion through a static moment became for me limited and unsatisfactory. The basic idea was to liberate myself from this old concept and arrive at an image in which the spectator could feel the beauty of a fourth dimension, which lies much more between moments than within a moment. In music one remembers never one tone, but a melody, a theme, a movement. In dance, never a moment, but again the beauty of a movement in time and space.”

— Ernst Haas

“We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as we seem to be able to move through metamorphosis into our own imaginations - a super civilization spread throughout space and time. Our future is a mystery, our destiny is to live in the imagination.”

— Terence McKenna

“How dark it is before the dawn! In reality that was the beginning of my last debauch. I was soon to be catapulted into what I like to call the fourth dimension of existence. I was to know happiness, peace, and usefulness, in a way of life that is incredibly more wonderful as time passes.”

— Bill W.

“Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.”

— Carl Sandburg

“The circle is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”

— Wassily Kandinsky

“To me, recordings are little fourth-dimension artifacts, because they already are representatives of past, present, and future, just inherently in their existence.”

— Will Oldham

“I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.”

— Marc Chagall

“Since I found that one could make a case shadow from a three-dimensional thing, any object whatsoever - just as the projecting of the sun on the earth makes two dimensions - I thought that by simple intellectual analogy, the fourth dimension could project an object of three dimensions, or, to put it another way, any three-dimensional object, which we see dispassionately, is a projection of something four-dimensional, something we are not familiar with.”

— Marcel Duchamp