The Quote Garden ™

I dig old books. ™

Est. 1998
Quotations about Math
SEE ALSO:
NUMBERS,
STATISTICS,
SCIENCE,
LOGIC,
COUNTING BLESSINGS,
INFINITE MONKEY THEOREM
Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer. ~Carl Sandburg, "Arithmetic"
Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings. ~Alfred North Whitehead
I don't agree with mathematics; the sum total of zeros is a frightening figure. ~Stanisław Jerzy Lec (1909–1966), translated by Jacek Gałązka
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
~Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012), "Possibilities," 1997, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak
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. ~Mark Twain
...the Red Queen remarked: "but I daresay you 've not had many lessons in manners yet?"
"Manners are not taught in lessons," said Alice. "Lessons teach you to do sums, and things of that sort."
"Can you do Addition?" the White Queen asked. "What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?"
"I don't know," said Alice. "I lost count."
"She can't do Addition," the Red Queen interrupted. "Can you do Subtraction? Take nine from eight."
"Nine from eight I can't, you know," Alice replied very readily: "but—"
"She can't do Substraction," said the White Queen. "Can you do Division? Divide a loaf by a knife — what's the answer to that?"
"I suppose—" Alice was beginning, but the Red Queen answered for her. "Bread-and-butter, of course..."
Alice... couldn't help thinking to herself, "What dreadful nonsense we are talking!"
"She can't do sums a bit!" the Queens said together, with great emphasis.
~Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
But it would be a grievous wrong to mathematical, as indeed to any, science, to rest its importance mainly on a utilitarian basis. The great truths with which it deals, are clothed with an austere grandeur, far above all purposes of immediate convenience or profit. It is in them that our limited understandings approach nearest to the conception of that absolute and infinite, toward which in most other things they aspire in vain. In the pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths, which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together, and which will continue to exist there, when the last of their radiant host shall have fallen from heaven. They existed not merely in metaphysical possibility, but in the actual contemplation of the supreme reason. The pen of inspiration, ranging all nature and life for imagery to set forth the Creator's power and wisdom, finds them best symbolized in the skill of the surveyor. "He meted out heaven as with a span;" and an ancient sage, neither falsely nor irreverently, ventured to say, that "God is a geometer." Yes, precisely by the same calculus by which I might number the individuals on this platform, has the Omniscient mind numbered the leaves in the interminable forest, the sands on the sea-shore, the particles of light that radiate from a universe of suns, the atoms of the ethereal medium, if such there be, which fills the infinite of space. ~Edward Everett, "Academical Education," 1857
There is no prophet that preaches the superpersonal God more plainly than mathematics... ~Paul Carus
I don't give a √D²... ~Gelett Burgess
...we arrive at the mathematical laws of the physical world. 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. ~Bertrand Russell
Yet what are all such gaieties to me
Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?
x 2 + 7 x + 53
= 11/3.
~Lewis Carroll, "A Double Acrostic," Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, 1869
If it be true that figures won't lie, that they won't even equivocate, that two and two exhibit an unbending determination to make four and nothing but four, at least figures do often play strange pranks... Most of us welcome a little ingenious trifling, an amiable coquetting with the truth... we like to find romance even in our arithmetic... ~William S. Walsh, "Freaks of Figures: A Glance at the Romance of Arithmetic," 1890
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. ~Bertrand Russell
If a spider wants to walk from the top corner of a room to the bottom corner farthest away, will he follow the angular diameter of the floor, or will his path be an obese tabloid? ~Stephen Leacock, "Intelligence Test for Bank Managers," The Garden of Folly, 1924
Believe me then, my friend, that that is a miserable arithmetic which would estimate friendship at nothing, or at less than nothing. ~Thomas Jefferson, 1786
LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basis of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion — thus:
Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.
Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; therefore—
Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second.
This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed. ~Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Word Book, 1906
We know that mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics. The two eyes of exact science are mathematics and logic: the mathematical sect puts out the logical eye, the logical sect puts out the mathematical eye; each believing that it sees better with one eye than with two. The consequences are ludicrous. ~The Athenæum, 1868
Gee whiz, if that's what you call diplomacy, I like arithmetic better, and that isn't saying much. ~Percy Keese Fitzhugh, Roy Blakeley: Lost, Strayed or Stolen, 1921
Everybody who knew anything about ciphering was called in to consider it. A young man from a high school near here, who made a specialty of mathematics and pimples, and who could readily tell how long a shadow a nine-pound ground-hog would cast at 2 o'clock and 37 minutes P.M., on ground-hog day, if sunny, at the town of Fungus, Dak., provided latitude and longitude and an irregular mass of red chalk be given to him, was secured to jerk a few logarithms in the interests of trade. He came and tried it for a few days, covered the interior of the Exposition Building with figures and then went away. ~Bill Nye, "Seeking to be Identified," Nye and Riley's Railway Guide by Edgar W. Nye and James Whitcomb Riley, 1888
...Science and mathematics
Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
They never touch it: consider what an explosion
Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world
If any mind should for a moment touch truth.
~Robinson Jeffers
"I only took the regular course."
"What was that?" inquired Alice.
"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied: "and then the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."
~Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
I agree with you quite upon mathematics too, and must be content to admire them at an incomprehensible distance, always adding them to the catalogue of my regrets. I know that two and two make four, and should be glad to prove it too, if I could, — though, I must say, if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into 5, it would give me much greater pleasure. The only part I remember which gave me much delight were those theorems (is that the word), in which, after ringing the changes upon A B and C D, etc., I at last came to "which is absurd" — "which is impossible," and at this point I have always arrived and fear always shall... ~Lord Byron, letter to Miss Milbanke, 1813
Professor Gayley, you're a great man, sure!
They say that you can almost fly! — can spell
And parse, but cannot figure well
(For mathematics is not literature)
And hold — with rancor — that twice two are fewer
Than they're cracked up to be...
~Ambrose Bierce, "The Troubadour"
THE TRUE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE: Do you know where triangles come from, Ted?
TED: I don't know. God dropped a square on the floor and it broke in half longways or something?
~Ted Lasso, "Sunflowers," 2023, written by Brendan Hunt, Sasha Garron, Keeley Hazell, and Dylan Marron [S3, E6, Ted]
Fill paper as you please with triangles and squares... ~Thomas Jefferson, 1786
Kaya no té wo
Hitotsu hazushité,
Tsuki-mi-kana!
This short poem is attributed to the famous poetess Chiyo. Having been challenged to make a poem of seventeen syllables referring to a square, a triangle, and a circle, she is said to have immediately responded with the above, translating to: "Detaching one corner of the mosquito-net, lo! I behold the moon!" ~Lafcadio Hearn, In Ghostly Japan, 1899 [a little altered —tg]
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Last saved 2025 Jan 25 Sat 17:40 CST
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