Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us consider the two possibilities. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Hesitate not, then, to wager that He is.
Pensees. 1670.
Loci: Convergence
Mathematical Quotations
Our library of quotations is organized alphabetically by surname of the author.
W. Somerset Maugham
It is a great nuisance that knowledge can only be acquired through hard work.
Maxwell, James Clerk (1813-1879)
... that, in a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.
Mayer, Maria Goeppert (1906 -1972)
Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.
McDuff, Dusa
Gel'fand amazed me by talking of mathematics as though it were poetry. He once said about a long paper bristling with formulas that it contained the vague beginnings of an idea which he could only hint at and which he had never managed to bring out more clearly. I had always thought of mathematics as being much more straightforward: a formula is a formula, and an algebra is an algebra, but Gel'fand found hedgehogs lurking in the rows of his spectral sequences!
McShane, E. J.
There are in this world optimists who feel that any symbol that starts off with an integral sign must necessarily denote something that will have every property that they should like an integral to possess. This of course is quite annoying to us rigorous mathematicians; what is even more annoying is that by doing so they often come up with the right answer.
J. W. Mellor
The experimental verification of a theory concerning any natural phenomenon generally rests on the result of an integration.
Mencken, H. L. (1880 - 1956)
Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
H.L. Mencken
For every problem, there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent (1892-1950)
Euclid alone has
looked on Beauty
bare.
Let all
who prate of Beauty
hold their peace,
And lay them prone
upon the earth and
cease
To ponder
on themselves, the
while they stare
At nothing,
intricately drawn
nowhere
In
shapes of shifting
lineage; let
geese
Gabble
and hiss, but heroes
seek release
From dusty bondage
into luminous
air.
O blinding
hour, O holy,
terrible day,
When first the
shaft into his
vision shone
Of
light anatomized!
Euclid alone
Has looked on
Beauty bare.
Fortunate they
Who, though once
only and then but
far away,
Have
heard her massive
sandal set on stone.
Milton, John (1608-1674)
Chaos umpire sits
And by decision
more
embroils
the fray
by
which he reigns:
next
him high
arbiter
Chance
governs all.