Math quotes
1.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside math — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say."
"To think I have spent my life on absolute muck."
"We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they'll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year."
"Test scores aren't perfect, but having a test score for math or reading or other things that we can objectively measure is a meaningful component that makes a lot of sense."
"Let no one say that I have said nothing new... the arrangement of the subject is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better."
"The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things."
"What is this frog and mouse battle among the mathematicians?"
"In modern times the belief that the ultimate explanation of all things was to be found in Newtonian mechanics was an adumbration of the truth that all science, as it grows towards perfection, becomes mathematical in its ideas."
"Apart from blunt truth, our lives sink decadently amid the perfume of hints and suggestions."
"I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming . . . and a little mad."
"I had the most beautiful set of theories you ever knew when I started out as a schoolma'am, but every one of them has failed me at some pinch or another."
"I am ill at these numbers."
"When we cannot use the compass of mathematics or the torch of experience...it is certain we cannot take a single step forward."
"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."
"Teaching school is but another word for sure and not very slow destruction."
"A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures."
"...the science of calculation also is indispensable as far as the extraction of the square and cube roots: Algebra as far as the quadratic equation and the use of logarithms are often of value in ordinary cases: but all beyond these is but a luxury; a delicious luxury indeed; but not be in indulged in by one who is to have a profession to follow for his subsistence."
"The electron is a theory we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real."
"Dad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just as math is the key -- and we will survive or founder, depending on how well the librarians do their jobs. Librarians didn't look glamorous to me but maybe Dad had hit on a not very obvious truth."
"I was terrible at maths, but I could grasp science, and I used to love to read about the lives of the scientists. I wanted to be a scientist or an inventor."
