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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"We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years."
"There can never be surprises in logic."
"Numbers are the highest degree of knowledge. It is knowledge itself."
"Math was always my bad subject. I couldn't convince my teachers that many of my answers were meant ironically."
"Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover."
"I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me."
"The bitter and the sweet come from the outside, the hard from within, from one's own efforts."
"It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
"A great deal more is known than has been proved."
"In the mathematics I can report no deficience, except that it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it."
"People love to admit they have bad handwriting or that they can't do math. And they will readily admit to being awkward: 'I'm such a klutz!' But they will never admit to having a poor sense of humor or being a bad driver."
"Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different."
"Logic is the anatomy of thought."
"In the fall of 1972, President Nixon announced that the rate of increase of inflation was decreasing. This was the first time a president used the third derivative to advance his case for reelection."
"Reason can wrestle and overthrow terror."
"You're not born knowing how to do math. You're taught that. You're not born knowing how to hate someone. You're taught that. And so I feel I want to use my platform to raise awareness about it. To help raise something positive. In America, you look around and a lot of things that happen - it all stems from that."
"The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things."
"It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe."
"Numbers constitute the only universal language."
"Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer."
