Quotes by Math Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it. Randall Munroe mathmaythinking I think the really cool and compelling thing about math and physics is that it opens up entry to all these hypotheticals - or at least, it gives you the language to talk about them. But at the same time, if a scenario is completely disconnected from reality, it's not all that interesting. Randall Munroe mathrealitythinking There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else - but persistent. Raoul Bott mathtwoway Mathematics was born and nurtured in a cultural environment. Without the perspective which the cultural background affords, a proper appreciation of the content and state of present-day mathematics is hardly possible. Raymond Louis Wilder perspectivemathappreciation There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned. Raymond Louis Wilder abstractionmysteriousmath Why do I act as I do? To tell you the truth, I have absolutely no idea why. It is simply my nature to act as I act, and that's all I can say. Raymond Smullyan no-ideamathideas Math . . . music .. . starry nights . . . These are secular ways of achieving transcendence, of feeling lifted into a grand perspective. It's a sense of being awed by existence that almost obliterates the self. Religious people think of it as an essentially religious experience but it's not. It's an essentially human experience. Rebecca Goldstein atheistreligiousmath Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science. Ralph Waldo Emerson mathlovescience All my family has very good mathematical abilities - like, so dorky. I was the dork then in school - on any maths exams I'd get 100%. I just knew how to do maths and most people would hate it, but for some reason it just came. Rebel Wilson hatemathschool I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as a writer. Ray Bradbury, 1967 interview (Doing the Math - that means for every story he sold, he wrote six "un-publishable" ones. Keep typing!) Ray Bradbury mathmenmean I'm really terrible at math, so I won't even attempt to do ratios and percentages, but all I know is that there's a lot of new songs that no-one has heard yet, and that there's a lot of old songs that some very, very super hardcore fans have heard for sure - there are people that have been coming and seeing me play in bars in like 2002, and there are songs that those people heard. Regina Spektor playmathsong The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown. Rene Magritte mathscienceart Topology is precisely the mathematical discipline that allows the passage from local to global. Rene Thom topologydisciplinemath If one must choose between rigour and meaning, I shall unhesitatingly choose the latter. Rene Thom latterrigourmath The world of ideas is not revealed to us in one stroke; we must both permanently and unceasingly recreate it in our consciousness. Rene Thom mathworldideas Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency. Rene Descartes powerfulmathknowledge Gauss replied, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical conclusions, that he had them long ago, all he was worrying about was how to reach them! Rene Dubos long-agomathworry Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare. Rene Descartes mathnumbersmen These long chains of perfectly simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to carry out their most difficult demonstrations had led me to fancy that everything that can fall under human knowledge forms a similar sequence; and that so long as we avoid accepting as true what is not so, and always preserve the right order of deduction of one thing from another, there can be nothing too remote to be reached in the end, or to well hidden to be discovered. Rene Descartes mathmeanfall The two operations of our understanding, intuition and deduction, on which alone we have said we must rely in the acquisition of knowledge. Rene Descartes understandingmathtwo«5859606162636465666768»
