Quotable Mathematics

"Conscious apprehension seems to exist […] as happens in a mirror-image when the smooth and bright surface is peaceful." (Plotinus...

"Mathematical analysis is as extensive as nature itself; it defines all perceptible relations, measures times, spaces, forces, temperat...

"Ideas are substitutions which require a secondary process when what is symbolized by them is translated into the images and experience...

"A belief system, through its memes, can spread in a way that looks just like a conspiracy without any conscious intention on the part ...

"[…] what is physical is subject to the laws of mathematics, and what is spiritual to the laws of God, and the laws of mathematics are ...

"In the initial stages of research, mathematicians do not seem to function like theorem-proving machines. Instead, they use some sort o...

"It has never yet been supposed, that all the facts of nature, and all the means of acquiring precision in the computation and analysis...

"Nature is a network of happenings that do not unroll like a red carpet into time, but are intertwined between every part of the world;...

"The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purp...

"Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." (Demosthenes, "Olynthiac...

"Mind is the limit and measure of all things [...]" (Nicolas of Cusa [Nicolaus Cusanus], "Idiota de mente" ["The La...

"A fact is not novel if it has an analogue which could have some interest. A fact which does not fit in with a series of known facts is...

"Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not...

"Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature, dies and understands as much as his observations on the order of nature, either with r...

"Mathematics make the mind attentive to the objects which it considers. This they do by entertaining it with a great variety of truths,...

"Things which do not now exist in the mind itself, can only be perceived, remembered, or imagined, by means of the ideas or images in t...

"The introduction of impossible quantities, is assigned as a great and primary cause of the evils under which mathematical science labo...