Quotes by Mathematicians - Page 14

Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.
Thomas Bartholin
The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with affection for another. Everybody knows that this is untrue.
Bertrand Russell
Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why: Drink! for you know not why you go nor where.
Omar Khayyám
Losses are comparative imagination only makes them of any moment.
Blaise Pascal
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Bertrand Russell
Wisdom is the fruit of a balanced development.
Alfred North Whitehead
I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.
Bertrand Russell
The total absence of humour in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
Not ignorance but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
To be able to use leisure intelligently will be the last product of an intelligent civilization.
Bertrand Russell
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
Alfred North Whitehead
If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous . . . There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.
Blaise Pascal
I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.
Johannes Kepler
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
[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
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is very important.
Bertrand Russell
The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga.
Subrahmanijan Chandrasekhar
What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?
David Eugene Smith
...as far as we are capable of knowledge we sin in neglecting to acquire it...
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The antithesis between a technical and a liberal education is fallacious. There can be no adequate technical education which is not liberal and no liberal education which is not technical.
Alfred North Whitehead
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary,destructive and terrible,thought is merciless to privilege,established institutions,and comfortable habit.Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.Thought is great and swift and free,the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
Bertrand Russell
The heterosexual emotions of young children can find a natural, wholesome and innocent outlet with other children; in this form they are a part of play, and like all play, they afford a preparation for adult activities.
Bertrand Russell
Work is of two kinds: first altering a position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter second telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid the second is pleasant and highly paid.
Bertrand Russell
To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.
Bertrand Russell
It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they (world religions) disagree, not more than one of them can be true.
Bertrand Russell
The Qur’an sought to reform, not to destroy and start from scratch, tosalvage what was useful and then to modify and build on it. The task wasto get the Arabs to think about religion in a novel way, to inculcate in them a new conceptual frame of reference, to transfer them from one worldview to another, and higher, one. This process of transformation took them from traditionalism to individualism, from impulsiveness to discipline, from supernaturalism to science, from intuition to conscious reasoning and, in the end, ideally, harmonized the whole.
Jeffrey Lang
It's much easier, after all, to learn mathematics from someone who's made a few mistakes. It's impossible to learn it from someone who always gets it right.
John C. Lennox
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past present and future state and at others whom it affects and see the relation of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
Blaise Pascal
Good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality.
Saunders Mac Lane
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
Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.
G H Hardy
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
One should respect public opinion in so far as it is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Bertrand Russell
that the grace of fable stirs the mind"...and..."that the perusal of excellent books is, as it were, to interview with the noblest men of past ages
René Descartes
The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground for it is the past and it is the future.
Alfred North Whitehead
How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
Alfred North Whitehead
There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration.
Blaise Pascal
Power is the near neighbour of necessity.
Pythagoras
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
And every science, when we understand it not as an instrument of power and domination but as an adventure in knowledge pursued by our species across the ages, is nothing but this harmony, more or less vast, more or less rich from one epoch to another, which unfurls over the course of generations and centuries, by the delicate counterpoint of all the themes appearing in turn, as if summoned from the void.
Alexandre Grothendieck
When the qualities that now confer leadership have become universal, there will no longer be leaders and followers, and democracy will have been realized at last.
Bertrand Russell
The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another. That is what people find so unpleasant about it.
Bertrand Russell
Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.
Norbert Wiener
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.
Bertrand Russell
There is nothing we can now call our own, for what we call so is the effect of art; crimes are made by decrees of the senate, or by the votes of the people; and as here-to-fore we are burdened by vices, so now we are oppressed by laws.
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
Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.
Bertrand Russell
The meaning of world is the separation of wish and fact.
Kurt Gödel
Dust into dust and under dust to lie Sans wine sans song sans singer and - sans end.
Omar Khayyám
have i gone mad?im afraid so, but let me tell you something, the best people usualy are.
Lewis Carroll
It is true that the modern Christian is less robust, but that is not thanks to Christianity; it is thanks to the generations of freethinkers, who from the Renaissance to the present day, have made Christians ashamed of many of their traditional beliefs. It is amusing to hear the modern Christian telling you how mild and rationalistic Christianity really is and ignoring the fact that all its mildness and rationalism is due to the teaching of men who in their own day were persecuted by all orthodox Christians.
Bertrand Russell
There was a seminar for advanced students in Zürich that I was teaching and von Neumann was in the class. I came to a certain theorem, and I said it is not proved and it may be difficult. Von Neumann didn’t say anything but after five minutes he raised his hand. When I called on him he went to the blackboard and proceeded to write down the proof. After that I was afraid of von Neumann.
George Pólya
The first rule of discovery is to have brains and good luck. The second rule of discovery is to sit tight and wait till you get a bright idea.
George Pólya
But, said Alice, if the world has absolutely no sense, who's stopping us from inventing one?
Lewis Carroll
For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau.
Bertrand Russell
Science is my territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams.
Freeman Dyson
The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
René Descartes
There was a footpath leading across fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.
Bertrand Russell
The first successes were such that one might suppose all the difficulties of science overcome in advance, and believe that the mathematician, without being longer occupied in the elaboration of pure mathematics, could turn his thoughts exclusively to the study of natural laws.
Joseph Louis François Bertrand