My opinion of mankind is founded upon the mournful fact that, so far as I can see, they find within themselves the means of believing in a thousand t….

All existing things upon this earth, which have knowledge of their own existence, possess, some in one degree and some in another, the power of thoug….

It was long before I got at the maxim, that in reading an old mathematician you will not read his riddle unless you plough with his heifer; you must ….

But the gambling reasoner is incorrigible: if he would but take to squaring the circle, what a load of misery would be saved..

The sacred writings excepted, no Greek has been so much read and so variously translated as Euclid..

It should seem that it is easier to square the circle than to get round a mathematician..

Mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics..

Imagine a person with a gift of ridicule [He might say] First that a negative quantity has no logarithm; secondly that a negative quantity has no squ….

[About Francis Baily] The history of the astronomy of the nineteenth century will be incomplete without a catalogue of his labours. He was one of the….

I was x years old in the year x2..

Wrong hypotheses, rightly worked from, have produced more useful results than unguided observations..

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum, And the great fleas themselves, ….

Common integration is only the memory of differentiation..

We know that mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics. The two eyes of science are mathematics and logic; the mathematica….

I did not hear what you said, but I absolutely disagree with you..

Every science that has thriven has thriven upon its own symbols: logic, the only science which is admitted to have made no improvements in century af….

The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination..

The Astronomer's Drinking Song Astronomers! What can avail Those who calumniate us; Experiment can never fail With such an apparatus..

Considerable obstacles generally present themselves to the beginner, in studying the elements of Solid Geometry, from the practice which has hitherto….

Lagrange, in one of the later years of his life, imagined that he had overcome the difficulty (of the parallel axiom). He went so far as to write a p….

As to writing another book on geometry [to replace Euclid] the middle ages would have as soon thought of composing another New Testament..