"Pushing The Envelope"
This phrase is used to refer to an aircraft being taken to, and perhaps beyond, its designated altitude and speed limits. By extension, this phrase may be used to mean testing other limits, either within aerospace or in other fields e.g. Plus ultra (motto).
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Famous quotes containing the words pushing the, pushing and/or envelope:
“Hands and knees
Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards.”
—Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
“It’s like pushing marbles through a sieve. It means the sieve will never be the same again.”
—Before the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami. As quoted in Crazy Salad, ch. 6, by Nora Ephron (1972)
“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)