Quotes by Mathematicians - Page 4

I have tried to read philosophers of all ages and have found many illuminating ideas but no steady progress toward deeper knowledge and understanding. Science, however, gives me the feeling of steady progress: I am convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics.

Max Born

Sometimes the hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn

Bertrand Russell

All this of Pot and Potter - Tell me then Who is the Potter pray and who the Pot?

Omar Khayyám

Nothing of worthy or weight can be achieved with half a mind with a faint heart and with a lame endeavor.

Isaac Barrow

and vinegar that makes them sour—and camomile that makes them bitter—and—and barley-sugar and such things that make children sweet-tempered. I only wish people knew that: then they wouldn’t be so stingy about it, you know—

Lewis Carroll

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction It is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

Theodore J. Kaczynski

The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

Alfred North Whitehead

Why it's simply impassible!Alice: Why, don't you mean impos

Lewis Carroll

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

René Descartes

At his "World of Physics" Web site, Eric W. Weisstein notes that the fine structure constant continues to fascinate numerologists, who have claimed that connections exist between alpha, the Cheops pyramid, and Stonehenge!

Clifford A. Pickover

Science is a river with two sources, the practical source and the theoretical source.

Alfred North Whitehead

In the pentagram, the Pythagoreans found all proportions well-known in antiquity: arithmetic, geometric, harmonic, and also the well-known golden proportion, or the golden ratio. ... Probably owing to the perfect form and the wealth of mathematical forms, the pentagram was chosen by the Pythagoreans as their secret symbol and a symbol of health. - Alexander Voloshinov [As quoted in Stakhov]

Alexey Stakhov

Nature … has made it impossible for us to have any communication from this earth with the other great bodies of the universe, in our present state; and it is highly possible that he has likewise cut off all communication betwixt the other planets, and betwixt the different systems.… We observe, in all of them, enough to raise our curiosity, but not to satisfy it … It does not appear to be suitable to the wisdom that shines throughout all nature, to suppose that we should see so far, and have our curiosity so much raised … only to be disappointed at the end … This, therefore, naturally leads us to consider our present state as only the dawn or beginning of our existence, and as a state of preparation or probation for farther advancement.…

Colin Maclaurin

I will fight for my people, but will they do the same for me?

Mihailo Petrovic

Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?”“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter

Lewis Carroll

Quite often, when an idea that could be helpful presents itself, we do not appreciate it, for it is so inconspicuous. The expert has, perhaps, no more ideas than the inexperienced, but appreciates more what he has and uses it better.

George Pólya

The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.

Bertrand Russell

Choose always the way that seems the best however rough it may be custom will soon render it easy and agreeable.

Pythagoras

Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.

Giordano Bruno

although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; for it is not a dictate of reason that what we thus see or imagine is in reality existent; but it plainly tells us that all our ideas or notions contain in them some truth.

René Descartes

Change is scientific, ‘progress’ is ethical. Change is indubitable whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

Bertrand Russell

Eloquence.— We need both what is pleasing and what is real, but that which pleases must itself be drawn from the true.

Blaise Pascal

If I were king, I would redress an abuse which cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind.

Émilie Du Châtelet

And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

Isaac Newton

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.

Blaise Pascal

Freedom of opinion can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.

Bertrand Russell

The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings

Lewis Carroll

Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

Lewis Carroll

The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.

Bertrand Russell

God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.

Blaise Pascal

[About Pierre de Fermat] It cannot be denied that he has had many exceptional ideas, and that he is a highly intelligent man. For my part, however, I have always been taught to take a broad overview of things, in order to be able to deduce from them general rules, which might be applicable elsewhere.

René Descartes

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life.

Bertrand Russell

Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence.

Pythagoras

Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

In vain we roared;in vain we triedTo rouse her into laughter:Her pensive glances wandered wideFrom orchestra to rafter -"TIER UPON TIER!" she said,and sighed;And silence followed after.

Lewis Carroll

To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

Lewis Carroll

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death.

Bertrand Russell

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

John Arbuthnot

Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor.

Norbert Wiener

There was never any reason to believe in any innate superiority of the male except his superior muscle.

Bertrand Russell

It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state...

James Clerk Maxwell

Thinking must never submit itself, neither to a dogma, nor to a party, nor to a passion, nor to an interest, nor to a preconceived idea, nor to whatever it may be, if not to facts themselves, because, for it, to submit would be to cease to be.

Jules Henri Poincaré

It is not difficult for an unwise mother quite unintentionally to centre the heterosexual feelings of a young son upon herself, and it is true that, if this is done, the evil consequences pointed out by Freud will probably ensue. This is, however, much less likely to occur if the mother's sexual life is satisfying to her, for in that case she will not look to her child for a type of emotional satisfaction which ought to be sought only from adults. The parental impulse in its purity is an impulse to care for the young, not to demand affection from them, and if a woman is happy in her sexual life she will abstain spontaneously from all improper demands for emotional response from her child.

Bertrand Russell

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Lewis Carroll

The elegance of a mathematical theorem is directly proportional to the number of independent ideas one can see in the theorem and inversely proportional to the effort it takes to see them.

George Pólya

Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much

Blaise Pascal

Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.

Jacob Bronowski

My tomb shall be in a spot where the north wind may scatter roses over it.

Omar Khayyám

The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice.

Blaise Pascal

When he said someone had "died", Erdős meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left", the person had died.

Paul Erdős

I entered Princeton University as a graduate student in 1959, when the Department of Mathematics was housed in the old Fine Hall. This legendary facility was marvellous in stimulating interaction among the graduate students and between the graduate students and the faculty. The faculty offered few formal courses, and essentially none of them were at the beginning graduate level. Instead the students were expected to learn the necessary background material by reading books and papers and by organising seminars among themselves. It was a stimulating environment but not an easy one for a student like me, who had come with only a spotty background. Fortunately I had an excellent group of classmates, and in retrospect I think the "Princeton method" of that period was quite effective.

Phillip A. Griffiths

Instinct teaches us to look for happiness outside ourselves.

Blaise Pascal

[I]n any profession the highest order of work is achieved, not by fussy empirical demands for 'something to be done,' but by patient study of the eternal laws.

Henry Whitehead

The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

Alfred North Whitehead

The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd.

Blaise Pascal

If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been changed.

Pascal

What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn’t really relevant.

Laurent Schwartz

A BOAT beneath a sunny sky,Lingering onward dreamilyIn an evening of July —Children three that nestle near,Eager eye and willing ear,Pleased a simple tale to hear —Long has paled that sunny sky:Echoes fade and memories die:Autumn frosts have slain July.Still she haunts me, phantomwise,Alice moving under skiesNever seen by waking eyes.Children yet, the tale to hear,Eager eye and willing ear,Lovingly shall nestle near.In a Wonderland they lie,Dreaming as the days go by,Dreaming as the summers die:Ever drifting down the stream —Lingering in the golden gleam —Life, what is it but a dream?

Lewis Carroll

If the butterfly wings its way to the sweet light that attracts it, it's only becasue it doesn't know that the fire can consume it.

Giordano Bruno

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