Quotes by Mathematicians

All mankind's unhappiness derives from one thing: his inability to know how to remain in repose in one room.

Blaise Pascal

Booty Butt, Booty Butt, Booty Butt Cheeks

René Descartes

Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.

Blaise Pascal

If, years later, I do use the slit detector to observe which way the electron went, it will mean that many years earlier the electron must have passed through one slit or the other. But if I don't use the "slit detector," then the electron must have passed through both slits. This is, of course, extremely weird. My actions at the beginning of the twenty-first century can change what happened thousands of years ago when the electron began its journey. It seems that just as there are multiple futures, there are also multiple pasts, and my acts of observation in the present can decide what happened in the past. As much as it challenges any hope of ever really knowing the future, quantum physics asks whether I can ever really know the past. It seems that the past is also in a superposition of possibilities that crystallize only once they are observed.

Marcus du Sautoy

Whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

Bertrand Russell

I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.

Blaise Pascal

Just as all things speak about God to those that know Him, and reveal Him to those that love Him, they also hide Him from all those that neither seek nor know Him.

Blaise Pascal

Biography is one of the new terrors of death.

John Arbuthnot

... This is a major theme in mathematics: things are what you want them to be. You have endless choices; there is no reality to get in your way.On the other hand, once you have made your choices then your new creations do what they do, whether you like it or not. This is the amazing thing about making imaginary patterns: they talk back!

Paul Lockhart

And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die Lift not your hands to it for help - for it As impotently moves as you or I.

Omar Khayyám

An attentive reader will always learn more, and more quickly, from good authors than from life.

Hervé Le Tellier

Mathematicians enjoy thinking about the simplest possible things, and the simplestpossible things are imaginary.

Paul Lockhart

A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal...

Bertrand Russell

It does appear that some parts of our evolutionary process seem inevitable. It is striking that throughout evolutionary history, the eye evolved independently fifty to a hundred times. This is strong evidence for the fact that the different rolls of the dice that have occurred across different species seem to have produced species with eyes regardless of what is going on around them. Lots of other examples illustrate how some features, if they are advantageous, seem to rise to the top of the evolutionary swamp. This is illustrated every time you see the same feature appearing more than once in different parts of the animal kingdom. Dolphins and bats, for example, use echolocation, but they evolved this trait independently at very different points on the evolutionary tree.

Marcus du Sautoy

Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

Blaise Pascal

In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.

Bertrand Russell

All that alcohol does for them is to liberate the sense of sin, which reason suppresses in saner moments.

Bertrand Russell

SIMPLICIO: ... You have to [learn to] walk before you can run.SALVIATI: No, you have to have something you want to run toward.

Paul Lockhart

Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

Lewis Carroll

How to describe the excitement I felt when I saw this beautiful work and realized its potential? I guess it's like when, after a long journey, suddenly a mountain peak comes in full view. You catch your breath, take in its majestic beauty, and all you can say is "Wow!" It's the moment of revelation. You have not yet reached the summit, you don't even know yet what obstacles lie ahead, but its allure is irresistible, and you already imagine yourself at the top. It's yours to conquer now. But do you have the strength and stamina to do it?

Edward Frenkel

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

Jacob Bronowski

Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.

Isaac Newton

Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know we become insensitive to many things of very great importance. Theology, on the other hand, induces a dogmatic belief that we have knowledge where in fact we have ignorance, and by doing so generates a kind of impertinent insolence towards the universe. Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.

Bertrand Russell

Whenever explaining an event, we must choose from three competing modes of explanation. These are regularity, chance, and design... To attribute an event to design is to say that it cannot reasonably be referred to either regularity or chance.

William A. Dembski

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives. There is a deep-seated fear, in most people, of the cold world and the possible cruelty of the herd; there is a longing for affection, which is often concealed by roughness, boorishness or a bullying manner in men, and by nagging and scolding in women. Passionate mutual love while it lasts puts an end to this feeling; it breaks down the hard walls of the ego, producing a new being composed of two in one.

Bertrand Russell

Now, what am I to do with this creature when I get it home?" when it grunted again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some alarm. This time there could be no mistake about it: it was neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be quite absurd for her to carry it any further. | So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to see it trot away quietly into the wood. "If it had grown up," she said to herself, "it would have made a dreadfully ugly child: but it makes a rather handsome pig, I think." And she began thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as pigs, and was just saying to herself, "if one only knew the right way to change them--" when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.

Lewis Carroll

When I met with Dr. Treffet in his hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, he told me that these innate skills are, in his words, "factory-installed software", or "genetic" memory.......Why the brain suppresses these remarkable abilities is still a mystery, but sometimes, when the brain is diseased or damaged, it relents and unleashes the inner genius.

Jason Padgett

Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness it is a sign of emotional failure.

Bertrand Russell

I think actually if you take the analogy with other areas of engineering, and increasingly of science and even mathematics, you can see people do not have to learn the vast number of formulae they used to learn. Instead, they have to learn to use the computer effectively. This frees them, I feel, to understand concepts and the foundations while they’re learning the mechanics of the application of the theory.

C.A.R. Hoare

Art forms that appeal to [leftists] tend to focus on ... defeat and despair ... as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation.

Theodore J. Kaczynski

I never knew what language they'd lapse into when fucked - Urdu or Telugu or a mix of both (only the techies came in English).

Manil Suri

In every action we must look beyond the action at our past, present and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all these things.

Blaise Pascal

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.

William A. Dembski

The heart has reasons which reason cannot understand.

Blaise Pascal

I prefer solitude to companions, since there are so few men who are trustworthy, and almost none truly learned. I do not say this because I demand scholarship in all men -- although the sum total of men's learning is small enough; but I question whether we should allow anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.

Girolamo Cardano

Losses are comparative only imagination makes them of any moment.

Blaise Pascal

Where would you be without etymology'? Lea asked sarcastically.'I think I might find words a little less interesting,' said Mr Ruche.

Denis Guedj

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Bertrand Russell

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? I appeal as a human being to human beings; remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

Bertrand Russell

Since the future's so iffy, I'll turn my attention to the past.

Manil Suri

The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life. The world of existence is fleeting, vague, without sharp boundaries, without any clear plan or arrangement, but it contains all thoughts and feelings, all the data of sense, and all physical objects, everything that can do either good or harm, everything that makes any difference to the value of life and the world. According to our temperaments, we shall prefer the contemplation of the one or of the other.

Bertrand Russell

Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable and praised when they are not praiseworthy.

Bertrand Russell

This seems charmingly paradoxical: scientists seek one truth but often voice many opinions journalists often speak of many truths while voicing a uniform view.

Christopher Essex

If children learn of sex as a relation between their parents to which they owe their own existence, they learn of it in its best form and in connection with its biological purpose.

Bertrand Russell

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

Blaise Pascal

Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not "corrected" as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted.

Amos Tversky

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than their, it is because they are made with ideas.

G H Hardy

Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.

Christopher Morcom

For any scientist the real challenge is not to stay within the secure garden of the known but to venture out into the wilds of the unknown.

Marcus du Sautoy

The ‘seriousness’ of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects. We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is ‘significant’ if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas. Thus a serious mathematical theorem, a theorem which connects significant ideas, is likely to lead to important advances in mathematics itself and even in other sciences.

G H Hardy

Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

William A. Dembski

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

Bertrand Russell

If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is certain to disagree with you sooner or later.

Lewis Carroll

Now because 18 months ago the first dawn, 3 months ago broad daylight but a very few days ago the full sun of the most highly remarkable spectacle has risen — nothing holds me back. I can give myself up to the sacred frenzy, I can have the insolence to make a full confession to mortal men that I have stolen the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make from them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt. If you forgive me I shall rejoice; if you are angry, I shall bear it; I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years; God himself has waited six thousand years for his work to be seen.

Johannes Kepler

The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.

Richard Hamming

Logic issues in tautologies, mathematics in identities, philosophy in definitions; all trivial, but all part of the vital work of clarifying and organising our thought.

Frank Plumpton Ramsey

All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They’re adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one.

Sylvain Cappell

The determination of the average man is not merely a matter of speculative curiosity; it may be of the most important service to the science of man and the social system. It ought necessarily to precede every other inquiry into social physics, since it is, as it were, the basis. The average man, indeed, is in a nation what the centre of gravity is in a body; it is by having that central point in view that we arrive at the apprehension of all the phenomena of equilibrium and motion.

Adolphe Quetelet

...we ought not meanwhile to make use of doubt in the conduct of life.

René Descartes

And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.

Jacob Bronowski

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