First, the line of progress is never straight. For a period a movement may follow a straight line and then it encounters obstacles and the path bends. It is like curving around a mountain when you are approaching a city. Often if feels as though you were moving backwards, and you lose sight of your goal: but in fact you are moving ahead, and soon you will see the city again, closer by.

Life is never a straight line.

In a world of gigantic administrative bureaucracies both public and private, searching for a new path might seem like hoping for a miracle.

Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.

His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.

You don’t think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that it is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell’s own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb.

A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.

a long journey is never a straight line

Having heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble … and if I did not go in a rigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something.

I know there is no straight road
No straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads

if someone gives you advice to not take their advice ...
you end up stuck in a recursive loop.

Progress doesn’t go in a straight line. Representation moves forward, then retreats. It’s a journey. I don’t know what the final destination looks like, or if there even is one. It’s just about pushing forward.

When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.

If you can't get to be uncommon through going straight, you'll never get to do it through going crooked. [...] live well and die happy.