Numbers quotes
4.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside numbers — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"With nuclear weapons, you'd think you would probably stop after killing 100million. Smallpox won't stop. Because the population is naïve, and there are no real preparations. That, if it got out and spread, would be a larger number."
"Look somewhere else for someone who can follow you in your researches about numbers. For my part, I confess that they are far beyond me, and I am competent only to admire them."
"In the beginning was the word, but it wasn't a fixed number of bits."
"A significant number of pages and sentences that the administration wants to keep in a classified status have already been released publicly, some of it by public statements of the leadership of the CIA and the FBI."
"I see you finally got a number to match your IQ."
"I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them."
"In America everything's about who's number one today."
"There are infinite numbers of do overs for your teen girls."
"Rigging is like Zen meditation. You must bend over the boat until your back is breaking, until your brain is filled with numbers and fractions of numbers, until you can accurately measure an oarlock's pitch without bothering to use the pitch meter. Only then will you see the way of eternal rigging happiness."
"A chart of numbers that would put an actuary to sleep can be made to dance if you put it on one side of a card and Bombo Rivera's picture on the other."
"As soon as science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigator rather develops a system of thought which, in general, is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms. We call such a system of thought a theory. The theory finds the justification for its existence in the fact that it correlates a large number of single observations, and it is just here that the 'truth' of the theory lies."
"However, if we examine the Canadian scene closely enough, we can see signs of this physical and spiritual rot settling into a number of our Canadian urban centres with a troubling spill-over into many of our more rural areas."
"The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumed with any spark of vitality."
"There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch."
"The turkey - my number one thing that people don't get is take that sucker out of the refrigerator about three hours before you plan on cooking it."
"Hardly any famine affects more than 5 percent, almost never more than 10 percent, of the population. The largest proportion of a population affected was the Irish famine of the 1840s, which came close to 10 percent over a number of years."
"Your diet has to be number one. If you don't eat the right things, it doesn't matter who you are. Sometimes those foods treat people differently."
"The toughest individual I've ever met in my life is Jim Kelly, No. 12."
"I think that every job that you can save is important. Every job that you can create is very important and it should not be the number one reason why we invest in infrastructure to create jobs."
"The faculty for remembering is not diminished in proportion to what one has learnt, just as little as the number of moulds in which you cast sand lessens its capacity for being cast in new moulds."
