Quotes by Mathematicians - Page 8

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
There was the door to which I found no key There was the veil through which 1 might not see.
Omar Khayyám
Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide.
William Kingdon Clifford
With great power comes great dissipation.
Timothy Poston
We must keep our thought secret, and judge everything by it, while talking like the people.
Blaise Pascal
God is in the world or nowhere creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine of God and that participation is his immortality ....
Alfred North Whitehead
There are men and gods, and beings like Pythagoras.
Pythagoras
We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it.
Roger Penrose
We think in generalities but we live in detail.
Alfred North Whitehead
Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.
Isaac Newton
Where would you be without etymology'? Lea asked sarcastically.'I think I might find words a little less interesting,' said Mr Ruche.
Denis Guedj
Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to give rest had no tendency to prove them.
Mary Everest Boole
Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.
Bertrand Russell
...the greater objective (representative) perfection there is in our idea of a thing, the greater also must be the perfection of its cause.
René Descartes
And this I know whether the one True Light Kindle to Love or Wrath consume me quite One flash of it within the Tavern caught Better than in the temple lost outright.
Omar Khayyám
The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite.
Bertrand Russell
Psychology is sometimes called a new science. This is quite wrong. Psychology is, perhaps, the oldest science, and, unfortunately, in its most essential features a forgotten science.
P.D. Ouspensky
I see nobody on the road,' said Alice'I only wish I had such eyes,' The King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!
Lewis Carroll
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
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
If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.
Bertrand Russell
People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.
Blaise Pascal
In Labor movements generally, success through violence can hardly be expected except in circumstances where success without violence is attainable.
Bertrand Russell
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
Alan Turing
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
Every man wherever he goes is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions which move with him like flies on a summer day.
Bertrand Russell
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
...we ought not meanwhile to make use of doubt in the conduct of life.
René Descartes
The difficulty is that, so long as unreason prevails, a solution of our troubles can only be reached by chance; for while reason, being impersonal, makes universal co-operation possible, unreason, since it represents private passions, makes strife inevitable. It is for this reason that rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species.
Bertrand Russell
Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house.
Henri Poincaré
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
The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.
Norbert Wiener
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Isaac Newton
Some persons fancy that bias and counter-bias are favorable to the extraction of truth–that hot and partisan debate is the way to investigate. This is the theory of our atrocious legal procedure. But Logic puts its heel upon this suggestion. It irrefragably demonstrates that knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it, and that the methods of obstinacy, of authority and every mode of trying to reach a foregone conclusion, are absolutely of no value. These things are proved. The reader is at liberty to think so or not as long as the proof is not set forth, or as long as he refrains from examining it. Just so, he can preserve, if he likes, his freedom of opinion in regard to the propositions of geometry; only, in that case, if he takes a fancy to read Euclid, he will do well to skip whatever he finds with A, B, C, etc., for, if he reads attentively that disagreeable matter, the freedom of his opinion about geometry may unhappily be lost forever.
Charles Sanders Peirce
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
I revered our theology, and aspired as much as any one to reach heaven: but being given assuredly to understand that the way is not less open to the most ignorant than to the most learned, and that the revealed truths which lead to heaven are above our comprehension, I did not presume to subject them to the impotency of my reason; and I thought that in order competently to undertake their examination, there was need of some special help from heaven, and of being more than man.
René Descartes
One thing is certain and the rest is lies The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.
Omar Khayyám
Instinct teaches us to look for happiness outside ourselves.
Blaise Pascal
Let us imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows, and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of men.
Pascal
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves and wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell
A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.
Bertrand Russell
All movements go too far.
Bertrand Russell
The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful.
Bertrand Russell
Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.
Gian-Carlo Rota
Thus nature provides a system for proportioning the growth of plants that satisfies the three canons of architecture. All modules are isotropic and they are related to the whole structure of the plant through self-similar spirals proportioned by the golden mean.
Jay Kappraff
If you want people to think well of you do not speak well of yourself.
Blaise Pascal
The importance of Man, which is the one indispensable dogma of the theologians, receives no support from a scientific view of the future of the solar system.
Bertrand Russell
We, the atom and I, have been on friendly terms, until recently. I saw in it the key to the deepest secrets of Nature, and it revealed to me the greatness of creation and the Creator.
Max Born
An attentive reader will always learn more, and more quickly, from good authors than from life.
Hervé Le Tellier
The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Bertrand Russell
...nothing cements a friendship like hating the same person.
Steven Strogatz
I was made to learn Latin and Greek, but I resented it, being of opinion that it was silly to learn a language that was no longer spoken. I believe that all the little good I got from years of classical studies I could have got in adult life in a month.
Bertrand Russell
If the nose of Cleopatra had been a little shorter the whole face of the world would have been changed.
Pascal
Before you can ask 'Is Darwinian theory correct or not?', You have to ask the preliminary question 'Is it clear enough so that it could be correct?'. That's a very different question. One of my prevailing doctrines about Darwinian theory is 'Man, that thing is just a mess. It's like looking into a room full of smoke.' Nothing in the theory is precisely, clearly, carefully defined or delineated. It lacks all of the rigor one expects from mathematical physics, and mathematical physics lacks all the rigor one expects from mathematics. So we're talking about a gradual descent down the level of intelligibility until we reach evolutionary biology.
David Berlinski
Always speak the truth - think before you speak - and write it down afterwards.
Lewis Carroll
...love must feel the ego of the beloved person as important as one's own ego, and must realize the other's feelings and wishes as though they were one's own.
Bertrand Russell
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Isaac Newton
Give me a place to stand, a lever long enough and a fulcrum. and I can move the Earth
Archimedes
Sometimes I have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Lewis Carroll
As I write this entry, I touch a saber-tooth tiger skull in my office. Without stars there could be no skulls
Clifford A. Pickover