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Your Quotes for 12 December 2005 - Symmetry

Long ago I decided it was more logical to write dates as day-month-year, in ascending order, and joined myself in this regard to Europeans, the military and legal system in the US, and it turns out, the internet; while putting myself in opposition to most civilians in the US. When I write 12-5-2005 I mean the twelfth of May, while others read it as the fifth of December, so I rarely use all numbers. But today I can write a check and date it 12-12-2005 and this tiny symmetry avoids all ambiguity. As I'd rather dwell on symmetry than ambiguity, here are a few quotes to celebrate this once-a-month occurrence.

Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness.
     - Aristotle, 384 - 322 BC

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
     - Derek Walcott

We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.
     - Frances E. Willard, 1839 - 1898

What makes a regiment of soldiers a more noble object of view than the same mass of mob? Their arms, their dresses, their banners, and the art and artificial symmetry of their position and movements.
     - George Gordon Noel Byron, 1788 - 1824

There is no country in the world where machinery is so lovely as in America. It was not until I had seen the water-works at Chicago that I realised the wonders of machinery; the rise and fall of the steel rods, the symmetrical motion of the great wheels is the most beautiful rhythmic thing I have ever seen.
     - Oscar Wilde, 1854 - 1900

We are a sad lot, the cell biologists. Like the furtive collectors of stolen art, we are forced to be lonely admirers of spectacular architecture, exquisite symmetry, dramas of violence and death, mobility, self-sacrifice and, yes, rococo sex.
     - Lorraine Lee Cudmore

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