Quotes on Math

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.

The length of your education is less important than its breadth, and the length of your life is less important than its depth.

Religion is so great a thing that it is right that those who will not take the trouble to seek it if it be obscure, should be deprived of it.

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

He who understands Archimedes and Apollonius will admire less the achievements of the foremost men of later times.

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.

From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.

It's your worst sin saving your f***ing life; It's the devil's knife carving holes into your soul so angels have a way to make their way inside; Life doesn't rhyme. Still, life is poetry, not math. The whole world's a stage, but the stage is a meditation mat. You tilt your head back; you breathe. when your heart is broken, you plant seeds in the cracks and you pray for rain.

I regard it as an inelegance, or imperfection, in quaternions, or rather in the state to which it has been hitherto unfolded, whenever it becomes or seems to become necessary to have recourse to x, y, z, etc.

A habit of basing convictions upon evidence, and of giving to them only that degree or certainty which the evidence warrants, would, if it became general, cure most of the ills from which the world suffers.

Math is the language of the universe. So the more equations you know, the more you can converse with the cosmos.

We could present spatially an atomic fact which contradicted the laws of physics, but not one which contradicted the laws of geometry.

We are not very pleased when we are forced to accept a mathematical truth by virtue of a complicated chain of formal conclusions and computations, which we traverse blindly, link by link, feeling our way by touch. We want first an overview of the aim and of the road; we want to understand the idea of the proof, the deeper context.

I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.

The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.

Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems.

If they would, for Example, praise the Beauty of a Woman, or any other Animal, they describe it by Rhombs, Circles, Parallelograms, Ellipses, and other geometrical terms.

It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.

Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.

Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.