Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it…
Book 1884
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions quotes
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About the book
A Square living in a two-dimensional world describes its geometry, customs and rigid social order. When a visitor from a world of three dimensions appears, he is forced to rethink everything he believed was possible. Part satire of Victorian society and part mathematical fable, the book is a classic introduction to thinking about higher dimensions.
6 quotes
Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.
A Square: Either this is madness or it is Hell. The Sphere: It is neither, … it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.
My volition shrinks from the painful task of recalling my humiliation; yet, like a second Prometheus, I will endure this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would…
Alas, how strong a family likeness runs through blind and persecuting humanity in all Dimensions! Points, Lines, Squares, Cubes, Extra-Cubes — we are all liable to the same errors, all alike the Slaves of our respective Dimensional prejudices
Heavily weighs on me at times the burdensome reflection that I cannot honestly say I am confident as to the exact shape of the once-seen, oft-regretted Cube; and in my nightly visions the mysterious precept, "Upward, not Northward", haunts me like a…