Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Mathematics.
Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don't happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data and yet we don't understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.
Simone Weil
It is from this absolute indifference and tranquillity of the mind, that mathematical speculations derive some of the most considerable advantages; because there is nothing to interest the imagination; because the judgment sits free and unbiased to examine the point. All proportions, every arrangement of quantity, is alike to the understanding, because the same truths result to it from all; from greater from lesser, from equality and inequality.
Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and
The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method
Nicholas Murray Butler, The Mean
The mathematics of high achievement
Thomas Carlyle
But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.
Albert Einstein
Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus:Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore-Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second.This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed.
Ambrose Bierce
Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is, of which it is supposed to be true. [...] Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true. People who have been puzzled by the beginnings of mathematics will, I hope, find comfort in this definition, and will probably agree that it is accurate.
Bertrand Russell
The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn't even know what numbers were. Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me. I was so intimidated by my incomprehension that I did not dare to ask any questions.
Carl Gustav Jung
I would advise you Sir, to study algebra, if you are not already an adept in it: your head would be less muddy, and you will leave off tormenting your neighbors about paper and packthread, while we all live together in a world that is bursting with sin and sorrow.
Samuel Johnson
One must divide one's time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.
All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one's brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.
Roger Bacon
Mathematicians, who are only mathematicians, have exact minds, provided all things are explained to them by means of definitions and axioms; otherwise they are inaccurate and insufferable, for they are only right when the principles are quite clear
Blaise Pascal
It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification -- the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life.
Alfred Korzybski
The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and
If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.
Francis Bacon, Essays, 1625
One has to be able to count if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty.
Maxim Gorky, The Zykovs, 1914
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky -- or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
Carl Sandburg, Complete Poems, 1
A man has one hundred dollars and you leave him with two dollars, that's subtraction.
Mae West, My Little Chickadee, 1
