These linear quotes will inspire you. Linear, arranged in or extending along a straight or nearly straight line.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging linear quotes, linear sayings, and linear proverbs.
Best Linear Quotes
- “We all learn best in our own ways. Some people do better studying one subject at a time, while some do better studying three things at once. Some people do best studying in structured, linear way, while others do best jumping around, surrounding a subject rather than traversing it. Some people prefer to learn by manipulating models, and others by reading.” ~ Bill Gates
- “I don’t believe that life is linear. I think of it as circles – concentric circles that connect.” ~ Michelle Williams , Life is not linear quotes
- “Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?” ~ William Zinsser
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“My nature is to be linear, and when I’m not, I feel really proud of myself.” ~ Cynthia Weil
- “Non-linear means it’s hard to solve.” ~ Arthur Mattuck
- “As soon as television became the only secondary way in which films were watched, films had to adhere to a pretty linear system, whereby you can drift off for ten minutes and go and answer the phone and not really lose your place.” ~ Christopher Nolan
- “I feel that I communicate best when I am not deliberately being linear. Along this same line, I feel some of the best sermons I’ve ever heard were in the theatre rather than the pulpit – as, for example, in the Theatre of the Absurd.” ~ Reverend Malcolm Boyd
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“Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.” ~ Larry Wall
- “I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print” ~ Laurell K. Hamilton
- “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “I have a different way of thinking. I think synergistically. I’m not linear in thinking, I’m not very logical.” ~ Imelda Marcos
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“Liberal soccer moms are precisely as likely to receive anthrax in the mail as to develop a capacity for linear thinking.” ~ Ann Coulter
- “So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.” ~ Diana Krall
- “I’ve never been convinced that experience is linear, circular, or even random. It just is. I try to put it in some kind of order to extract meaning from it, to bring meaning to it.” ~ Toni Cade Bambara
- “I’ve always been fascinated by the operation of memory – the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence.” ~ Penelope Lively
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“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “No, absolutely not, writing doesn’t have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.” ~ Guillermo Cabrera Infante
- “Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality.” ~ Stanislav Grof
- “For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That’s a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they’re unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork.” ~ Neil Gershenfeld
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“Death is simply a break in our linear stream of consciousness.” ~ Robert Lanza
- “I’m a creature of adaptation. I take advantage of the second and the moment. My comedy breathes; it’s not really that predictable. I do have a linear style, but other than that, there’s a lot of abstract. I just go off on what I’m thinking. I’m not that topical. I like to talk about me and my experiences.” ~ Tommy Davidson
- “Our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a stream of random events is taking place.” ~ J. G. Ballard
- “Really, I’m incredibly disjointed and not candid. Just in general, my thoughts tend to come out in little spurts that don’t necessarily connect. If you hang around long enough, you can find the linear path. But it will take a second. That is why these interviews never go well for me.” ~ Kristen Stewart
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“I thin many people’s deviant behavior starts with dreams because dreams are so non-linear… as if there’s an assumption that everything has to be linear or has to be plotted.” ~ Robyn Hitchcock
- “Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
- “All directors make films in individual ways. But the classical kind of view of filmmaking is that you have a script and it’s very linear.” ~ Paul Greengrass
- “I think there will be 20 years of evolution from linear broadcast to internet television.” ~ Reed Hastings
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“Of course my family and friends are incredibly valuable to me. They keep me sane, they teach me things and I love spending time with them. I think that ranking what you value is a sort of western and linear way of looking at things.” ~ Julia Stiles
- “Lots of people think, well, we’re humans; we’re the most intelligent and accomplished species; we’re in charge. Bacteria may have a different outlook: more bacteria live and work in one linear centimeter of your lower colon than all the humans who have ever lived. That’s what’s going on in your digestive tract right now. Are we in charge, or are we simply hosts for bacteria? It all depends on your outlook.” ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson
- “The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar.” ~ Penelope Lively
- “Anything that exists on a time basis – that has a beginning, middle, and end, because you start watching it and then you’re in the middle of watching it and then it ends – anything linear, for me, is narrative.” ~ Saschka Unseld
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“Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.” ~ Natalie Goldberg
- “That’s the case with these exponential technologies; our brains, they struggle with it. We live in a world that is global and exponential, and our brains evolved in a world that was linear and local.” ~ Jason Silva
- “Games, by nature, have more plot options and non-linear qualities than TV and film.” ~ David Duchovny
- “I wasn’t prepared for the fact that grief is so unpredictable. It wasn’t just sadness, and it wasn’t linear. Somehow I’d thought that the first days would be the worst and then it would get steadily better – like getting over the flu. That’s not how it was.” ~ Meghan O’Rourke
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“The biblical picture is not one of an upward, linear progress or a precipitous, downward decline. It is a more complicated picture of a fallen world in which there is a gospel of power.” ~ Russell D. Moore
- “The linear-programming was – and is – perhaps the single most important real-life problem.” ~ Keith Devlin
- “Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.” ~ Lynn Margulis
- “My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly imaginative, but if I look for things in different places, sometimes things happen.” ~ Christopher Walken
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“There’s a logic to dreams that doesn’t necessarily follow linear narrative. You don’t know why things happen, it’s your subconscious pushing you, to give you information.” ~ Justin Theroux
- “Music and film are parallel experiences: they are linear, they are narrative.” ~ Todd Haynes
- “Graffiti is linear and it’s done with a pencil, and it’s like writing on walls. But in my paintings it’s more lyrical.” ~ Cy Twombly
- “You know, in our culture today, our Western, reductionist, Roman, linear, fragmented… culture, we don’t ask how to make a pig happy. We ask how to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper, and that’s not a noble goal.” ~ Joel Salatin
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“The western mind is linear, the eastern mind is circular.” ~ Rajneesh
- “Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art-and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- “The painting is always conceived as the linear record of a rhythmic gesture: it is a graph of a dance executed by the hand. Not only the artist’s eye and hand perform this dance, so does the eye of the beholder.” ~ Roger Fry
- “Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn’t leave them about… I understand what he was doing: discovering what’s there… to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution.” ~ David Hockney
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“If we fail to appreciate the soul that Easternism gives us, then what we have is a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process that counts on cleverness.” ~ Joel Salatin
- “All incarnations are lived at once, and yet there does seem to be a linear sense of time when you’re in the vortex of time and space, when your consciousness is fixated in a body.” ~ Frederick Lenz
- “If it is possible to have a linear unit that depends on no other quantity, it would seem natural to prefer it. Moreover, a mensural unit taken from the earth itself offers another advantage, that of being perfectly analogous to all the real measurements that in ordinary usage are also made upon the earth, such as the distance between two places or the area of some tract, for example. It is far more natural in practice to refer geographical distances to a quadrant of a great circle than to the length of a pendulum.” ~ Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet
- “To some degree. I think that I’ve always been very much of a chordal person. The chords are the foundation of everything. Some of Yes’ stuff is very linear, albeit complex, but it’s single-line melodic stuff. So I kind of had to wear a different cap working with Yes. It’s not so much chord-based.” ~ Geoff Downes
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“I never write in a linear way. And I tell students not to. You can only know so much about a book when you first start.” ~ Carol Anshaw
- “I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.” ~ Frank Gehry
- “I do genuinely believe that the political system is not linear. When it reaches a tipping point fashioned by a critical mass of opinion, the slow pace of change we’re used to will no longer be the norm. I see a lot of signs every day that we’re moving closer and closer to that tipping point.” ~ Al Gore
- “My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you’re not strictly bound to a linear narrative.” ~ Tommy Lee Jones
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“Alix [MacKenzie] was a looser, more linear painter, dealing with amoebic forms, let’s say, close to [Joan] Miró as opposed to my more static exploration of space.” ~ Warren MacKenzie
- “You see, Dad, Professor McLuhan says that the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential thought, separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a village. Get it?” ~ Marshall McLuhan
- “Freud, one of the grand masters of narrative, knew that the past is not fixed in the way that linear time suggests. We can return. We can pick up what we dropped. We can mend what others broke. We can talk with the dead.” ~ Jeanette Winterson
- “The horrible truth is we are linear beings; we can’t multitask, and we shouldn’t keep interrupting important connections to each other with the latest message coming in.” ~ Douglas Rushkoff
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“The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.” ~ Jeanette Winterson
- “All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don’t keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative – good old-fashioned storytelling – is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug.” ~ William Zinsser
- “People who think achieving success is a linear A-to-Z process, a straight shot to the top, simply aren’t in touch with reality.” ~ Donald Trump
- “As Alaska zipped through something obvious about linear equations, stoner/baller Hank Walsten said, “Wait, wait. I don’t get it.” “That’s because you have eight functioning brain cells.” “Studies show that Marijuana is better for your health than those cigarettes,” Hank said. Alaska swallowed a mouthful of fries, took a drag on her cigarette, and blew a smoke at Hank. “I may die young,” she said. “But at least I’ll die smart. Now, back to tangents.” ~ John Green
- “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.” ~ Steven Moffat
- “The place didn’t look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.” ~ Penelope Lively
