Quotable Mathematics

"Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told ...

"The function of man’s highest faculty, his reason, consists precisely of the continuous limitation of infinity, the breaking up of inf...

"The philosopher who is really useful to the cause of science, is he who, uniting to a fertile imagination, a rigid severity in investi...

"This is the greatest degree of impoverishment; the [mental] image, deprived little by little of its own characteristics, is nothing mo...

"Symmetry is evidently a kind of unity in variety, where a whole is determined by the rhythmic repetition of similar."  (George Sa...

"[Mathematics] guides our minds in an orderly way, and furnishes us simple and rational principles by means of which ambiguities are cl...

"One thinks one’s something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one’s merely a slight delay in the ongoing ...

"[…] the mind orders nothing by its own motions, but lies merely receptive under the impressions of bodies, reflecting empty images in ...

"Every presentation of philosophy, whether oral or written, is to be taken and can only be taken in the sense of a means. Every system ...

"Always take the short cut; and that is the rational one. Therefore say and do everything according to soundest reason." (Marcus A...

"No human being will ever know the Truth, for even if they happen to say it by chance, they would not even known they had done so....

"Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited ...

"Here I am at the limit which God and nature has assigned to my individuality. I am compelled to depend upon word, language and image i...

"It is of our very nature to see the universe as a place that we can talk about. In particular, you will remember, the brain tends to c...

"The first obligation of Simplicity is that of using the simplest means to secure the fullest effect. But although the mind instinctive...

"The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; it is also a sign of g...

"Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or f...

"The analysis of concepts is for the understanding nothing more than what the magnifying glass is for sight." (Moses Mendelssohn, ...

"The impossibility of separating the nomenclature of a science from the science itself is owing to this, that every branch of physical ...

"You may read any quantity of books, and you may be almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of your ...