c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Lebanese freedom of speech : You get to say whatever you like as long as the authorities approve of it... Hilarious.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour, Ending Syria's Occupation Of Lebanon: The U.S. Role
We’re not dreamers. We’re awaking from a dream turning into a nightmare. We’re not destroying anything. We’re watching the system destroy itself.
— Slavoj Žižek
Even Dionysus's welcome-home speech wasn't enough to dampen my spirits. "Yes, yes, so the little brat didn't get himself killed and now he'll have an even bigger head. Well, huzzah for that. In other announcements, there will be no canoe races this Saturday....
— Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief
There is a fine line between free speech and hate speech. Free speech encourages debate whereas hate speech incites violence.
— Newton Lee, Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness
How are you going to make it move? It doesn't have a – " "Be very quiet," advised the duke, "for it goes without saying."And, sure enough, as soon as they were all quite still, it began to move quickly through the streets, and in a very short time they arrived at the royal palace.
— Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar; Self-Reliance. Compensation
So I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm and sometimes it’s fast and sometimes it’s slower, and maybe what’s happening is this drumbeat is just accelerating and it’s gotten to the point where I can’t hear between the beats anymore and it’s just a hum.
— Steven Soderbergh
So long as I am acting from duty and conviction, I am indifferent to taunts and jeers. I think they will probably do me more good than harm.
— Winston S. Churchill
again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.
— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
He spoke in a trembling voice that didn’t seem to be entirely in sync with the movement of his lips. That’s because sound travels slower in halitosis.
— Sorin Suciu, The Scriptlings
Baseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech — a slightly elevated and concentrated form.
— Thomas Boswell, How Life Imitates the World Series
[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Someone heroic and valiant, not merely skilled in speech; someone who is kind and pure in heart. Someone who does not play with white roses that belong to others.
— Sarah Mally, Before You Meet Prince Charming: A Guide to Radiant Purity
The essence of America – that which really unites us — is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion – it is an idea — and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things. That it doesn’t matter where you came from but where you are going.
— Condoleezza Rice
Fuck the lot of you and your hypocritical bullshit. You sit around spouting brotherhood. You don't know the first thing about being a brother. Or being a man. Because a real man sure as hell would never have disrespected a woman the way each and everyone of you have disrespected Maysie.
— A. Meredith Walters, Bad Rep
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
— Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Let justice be done tho the heavens fall.
— Michael Davitt
I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.
— Neil Gaiman
To speak of happiness is to create happiness.
— Marty Rubin
The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole.
— G.K. Chesterton, Five Types
And I saw just the other day, in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his 8-year-old daughter, whose long battle with leukemia nearly cost their family everything had it not been for the health care reform passing just a few months before the insurance company was about to stop paying for her care.I had an opportunity to not just talk to the father, but meet this incredible daughter of his. And when he spoke to the crowd listening to that father's story, every parent in that room had tears in their eyes, because we knew that little girl could be our own.
— Barack Obama
I want everyone to get plenty of rest tonight, because tomorrow, we make plans to bury the new council chair. And don't worry about the shovel shortage," I said, glancing from face to determined face. "Because Calvin Malone has dug his own grave.
— Rachel Vincent, Alpha
He had a voice you couldn't miss: strong and penetrating with strange vowels that sounded different from the accents of other English speakers even to me. I later discovered that he was Canadian.
— Arnold Schwarzenegger, Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story
Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory as an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study [Lionel Logue said]
— Mark Logue, The King's Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.
— Dalai Lama XIV
Nothing external to you has any power over you.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson
Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.
— Eckhart Tolle
Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I've made peace with myself.Good for you. That's the hardest war of all to win.Didn't say I won. Just stopped fighting.
— Joe Abercrombie, Best Served Cold
Peace of mind comes from not wanting to change others.
— Gerald G. Jampolsky, Love Is Letting Go of Fear
Having inner peace means committing to letting go of self-criticism and self-doubt.
— Sanaya Roman, Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation
I left home and tried to live the life of a hermit, but I was still fighting myself. I went to England and worked as a chainman on the road. It was better therapy than the shrinks. Building a two-mile road gave me internal peace.
— Brian Strang
See and live life for the wonderful gift that it is ...acknowledging everyone's beauty, flaws, frailty, strength, gifts and possibilities. Honour and cherish it and above be loving and compassionate. Here is the birthplace of inner and worldly peace.
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
This internal sea. The problem is that this beautiful ocean carries with it loads ay poisonous flotsam and jetsam... that poison is diluted by the sea, but once the ocean rolls out, it leaves the shite behind, inside ma body.
— Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
We are most of us two people, your Highness. There is something lacking in the man who is one thing only, and so, as he believes, at peace with the world and with himself.
— Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories
I put it all to rest; my mind, my body, and all those nasty, gnawing fears. With each sip of tea, I become whole, one again, with me.
— Dharlene Marie Fahl
Freedom will remain elusive as long as there remains a 'self' to be freed.
— Darryl Diptee, Free Your Mind
Religion of Blue CircleTo bring and give a lesson,is to leave the last lesson not pronounced.Amen, Petra Cecilia Maria HermansAugust 29, 2016AmenGod
— Petra Hermans
There are 2 versions of Self Image. Inner and Outer.Get in touch with the inner self image and dispose of any concept of the outer world. Feel the energy that comes from this image and start being true from source of this energy. The source of god.
— Matthew Donnelly
...The miracle is not to walk on water or in thin air, but to walk on Earth. Walk in such a way that you become fully alive and joy and happiness are possible. That is the miracle that everyone can perform.... If you have mindfulness, concentration, and insight then every step you make on this Earth is performing a miracle.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering
The more you kick and scream, bite, scratch and try to run away, the darker the skies will get. You cannot run away from your pain and you cannot outrun the storm. By embracing your pain and bringing it within to heal, you empower your own growth. Accept what is, what was, and what is yet to come. This is the path to inner peace.
— L.J. Vanier, Ether: Into the Nemesis
Today was about chasing sun-rays, beach waves, & sunsets. All things beautiful that give you peace are worth chasing. Everything else isn't.
— April Mae Monterrosa
We all have a different answer to what defines our happiness and fulfillment, but for all of us it begins with inner peace. Without inner peace, happiness and fulfillment is hard to reach.
— Ron Baratono
Inner peace is a quiet evening moonlight walk in the soft falling snow of our minds
— Wes Adamson
To surrender is not giving up the struggle, but finding peace within the struggle.
— Michelle Cruz-Rosado
I discovered the treasure I have within and now I am richer than any king or a queen.
— Ricky Saikia
The Kingdom of Heaven wants to rest in our hearts.
— Jared Brock, A Year of Living Prayerfully: How a Curious Traveler Met the Pope, Walked on Coals, Danced with Rabbis, and Revived His Prayer Life
What if making peace with our warring hearts—peace within—is the first step to world peace?
— Jared Brock, A Year of Living Prayerfully: How a Curious Traveler Met the Pope, Walked on Coals, Danced with Rabbis, and Revived His Prayer Life
Attachment to the external always suffocates inner peace.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Make peace with yourself and you make peace with the world. - Charmainism
— Charmaine Smith Ladd, Shake Hands with Yourself: A Peacemaker's Guide to Happiness & Inner Peace
Self-forgiveness is a daily practice of the humble, strong and mentally sane. It is an intentional preservation of inner-peace and a reflection of a healthy self-concept.
— Shannon Tanner, Worthy: The POWER of Wholeness
Sometimes in life, soul is called to Rise even if it's alone, leave all behind and Rise anyway!
— Coletha Albert, Situations - A Book of Poems on Life
You have to be the right type for calm waters. For some, dead calm is inner peace, for others it's the doldrums.
— Daniel Glattauer, Alle sieben Wellen
Your mind will enchain you. Your heart will set you free
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
You can always be a better person, a better version of you, focus on that you do that makes you feel good, cultivateactivities that make you feel in peaceand make them part of your daily life.
— Jorge Gw, Awesome Happiness Now
The best way to find inner peace is the practice in forbearance.
— Kristian Goldmund Aumann, Love Poems: Love Conquers All
. . . in the storm of emotions, we can create a small, peaceful sanctuary within.
— Mary Morrissey
If our emotional stability is based on what other people do or do not do, then we have no stability. If our emotional stability is based on love that is changeless and unalterable, then we attain the stability of God.
— Marianne Williamson, Enchanted Love: The Mystical Power Of Intimate Relationships
Follow your heart, not the crowd ...
— Ian Tucker, Your Simple Path - Find Happiness in every step.
If it gathers dust, give it away ...
— Ian Tucker, Your Simple Path - Find Happiness in every step.
No price is too great to pay for inner peace. Peace is the harmonious control of life. It is vibrant with life-energy. It is a power that easily transcends all our worldly knowledge. Yet it is not separate from our earthly existence. If we open the right avenues within, this peace can be felt here and now.
— Sri Chinmoy, The Jewels of Happiness: Inspiration and Wisdom to Guide Your Life-Journey
So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Give as you wish to live, it all come's back to you. And that's without exception ...
— Ian Tucker, Your Simple Path - Find Happiness in every step.
Human laws pattern divine laws, but divine laws use only originals.
— Mamie Smith, The Unfolding of a Rose
Outer peace can only be manifested through inner peace for what goes on within us will manifest outwardly. It's important to take some time each day to go within to befriend our inner self---Sasha Samy
— Sasha Samy, Shadow To Light: Transformational Journeys From Abuse & Betrayal To Empowerment
Remembering to be conscious is the beginning of inner peace and freedom.
— Gabriella Kortsch, Rewiring the Soul: Finding the Possible Self: How Your Connection to Yourself Can Make All the Difference
Weather out the storm in the island of tranquility to find inner peace.
— Ana Monnar, Express Yourself 101 for Your Eyes Only Volume 2
I'm sorry to say that the subject I most disliked was mathematics. I have thought about it. I think the reason was that mathematics leaves no room for argument. If you made a mistake, that was all there was to it.
— Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself any more.
— Albert Einstein
Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.
— Yōko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor
With me, everything turns into mathematics.
— René Descartes
I think we need more math majors who don't become mathematicians. More math major doctors, more math major high school teachers, more math major CEOs, more math major senators. But we won't get there unless we dump the stereotype that math is only worthwhile for kid geniuses.
— Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
Some people believe in imaginary friends. I believe in imaginary numbers.
— R.M. ArceJaeger
I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.
— C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum.
— Leonhard Euler
I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
— Thomas Mann
Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications.
— Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
Mathematics is the art of explanation.
— Paul  Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form
My beautiful proof lies all in ruins.
— Georg Cantor
Dividing one number by another is mere computation 
—  knowing what to divide by what is mathematics.
...The pages and pages of complex, impenetrable calculations might have contained the secrets of the universe, copied out of God's notebook. In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to eart.
— Yōko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor
The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened
— Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
I guess I think of lotteries as a tax on the mathematically challenged.
— Roger Jones
A mathematician says that an electromagnetic wave travels from Andromeda to your eye and that it also extends from Andromeda to your eye.
— Bill Gaede
All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They’re adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one.
— Sylvain Cappell
The algebraic sum of all the transformations occurring in a cyclical process can only be positive, or, as an extreme case, equal to no
— Rudolf Clausius, Abhandlungen
Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world's unhappiness on the advent of calculators.
— Ann Patchett, The Magician's Assistant
If you plug in a number and the math starts getting creepy (anything involving fractions or negative numbers is creepy)...
— Doug Pierce
I had a feeling once about Mathematics - that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me - the Byss and Abyss. I saw - as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show - a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.
— Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life, 1874-1904
It's a simple matter of mathematics.
— Jean Lee Latham, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch
The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.
— Richard   Preston
Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur.
— Nicolaus Copernicus, De Revolutionibus Libri Sex (Nicolaus Copernicus: Gesamtausgabe)
A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space.
— Bill Gaede
Certainly the best times were when I was alone with mathematics, free of ambition and pretense, and indifferent to the world.
— Robert Langlands
Instead of concentrating just on finding good answers to questions, it's more important to learn how to find good questions!
— Donald E. Knuth
[The golden proportion] is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult [to produce] and the good easy.
— Albert Einstein
In a way, mathematics is the only infinite human activity. It is conceivable that humanity could eventually learn everything in physics or biology. But humanity certainly won't ever be able to find out everything in mathematics, because the subject is infinite. Numbers themselves are infinite. That's why mathematics is really my only interest.
— Paul Erdős
I did the math. (I presume Americans don't pluralise mathematics because they only plan to do it once.)
— Sheridan Jobbins, Wish You Were Here
When he said someone had 'died", Erdős meant that that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left", the person had died.
— Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of  Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth
Mathematician need only peace of mind and occasionally, paper and pencil.
— Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of  Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth
We’ll start with an easy one, shall we? What is the secant of three pi?” The troll asked. “Pie?” Toru felt suddenly hungry. “What are you talking about, man, have you gone senile? A sea camp? You mean like the floating city?
— Noor Al-Shanti, The Renegade King
When he said someone had "died", Erdős meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left", the person had died.
— Paul Erdős
The impulse to all movement and all form is given by [the golden ratio], since it is the proportion that summarizes in itself the additive and the geometric, or logarithmic, series.
— Schwaller de Lubicz
I am not qualified to say whether or not God exists. I kind of doubt He does. Nevertheless I'm always saying that the SF( The SF is the supreme Fascist, the Number-One guy up there) has this transfinite book-transfinite being a concept in mathematics that is larger than infinite-that contains the best proofs of all mathematical theorems, proofs that are elegant and perfect.
— Paul Erdős
...317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is, because mathematical reality is built that way.
— G H Hardy
The Golden Ratio defines the squaring of a circle. Stated in mathematical terms, this says: Given a square of known perimeter, create a circle of equal circumference. According to some, in ancient Egypt, this mathematical mystery was encoded in the measurements of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
— Marja de Vries, The Whole Elephant Revealed: Insights into the existence and operation of Universal Laws and the Golden Ratio
It is shown that the golden ratio plays a prominent role in the dimensions of all objects which exhibit five-fold symmetry. It is also showed that among the irrational numbers, the golden ratio is the most irrational and, as a result, has unique applications in number theory, search algorithms, the minimization of functions, network theory, the atomic structure of certain materials and the growth of biological organisms.
— Richard A. Dunlap, The Golden Ratio and Fibonacci Numbers
A mathematician is an individual who proves his beliefs with equations.
— Bill Gaede, Why God Doesn't Exist
So the mathematician and the artist are companioned in the same dark, and do obeisance to the same gods.
— Howard Jacobson
...no thought, if it be non-mathematical in spirit, can be trusted, and, although mathematicians sometimes make mistakes, the spirit of mathematics is always right and always sound.
— Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity
The number of God is Pi and Euler number is evil.
— @mathorart
Mathematics is the most exact science, and its conclusions are capable of absolute proof. But this is so only because mathematics does not attempt to draw absolute conclusions. All mathematical truths are relative, conditional.
— Charles Proteus Steinmetz
Man had been given a brain that could think in numbers, and it could not be coincidence that the world was unlocked by that very tool. To understand any aspect of the cosmos was to look on the face of God: not directly, but by a species of triangulation, because to think mathematically was to feel the action of God in oneself.
— Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant
Mathematics isn’t just science, it is poetry – our efforts to crystallise the unglimpsed connections between things. Poetry that bridges and magnifies the mysteries of the galaxy. But the signs and symbols and equations sentients employ to express these connections are not discoveries but the teasing out of secrets that have always existed.
— James Luceno, Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel
The spirit of mathematics is not captured by spending 3 hours solving 20 look-alike homework problems. Mathematics is thinking, comparing, analyzing, inventing, and understanding. The main point is not quantity or speed—the main point is quality of thought.The spirit of mathematics is not captured by spending 3 hours solving 20 look-alike homework problems. Mathematics is thinking, comparing, analyzing, inventing, and understanding. The main point is not quantity or speed—the main point is quality of thought.
— Jane Gilman
The focus of history and philosophy of science scholar Arthur Miller’s (2010) "137: Jung and Pauli and the Pursuit of Scientific Obsession" is Jung and Pauli’smutual effort to discover the cosmic number or fine structure constant, which is a fundamental physical constant dealing with electromagnetism, or, from a different perspective, could be considered the philosopher’s stone of the mathematical universe.This was indeed one of Pauli and Jung’s collaborative passions, but it was not the only concentration of their relationship. Quantum physics could be seen as the natural progression from ancient alchemy, through chemistry, culminating in the abstract world of subatomic particles, wave functions, and mathematics. [Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy]
— Todd Hayen
His ironing seemed highly rational, with a constant speed that allowed him to get the best results, with the least effort; all the economy and elegance of his mathematical proofs performed right there on the ironing board. The Professor was definitely the best man for this job, we had to admit, since the tablecloth was made of delicate lace.
— Yōko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor
The golden era of the golden number was the Italian renaissance. The expression divine proportion was coined by the great mathematician Luca Pacioli in his book 'De divina proportione', written in 1509.
— Midhat Gazale, Gnomon: From Pharaohs to Fractals
Overstimulation has been the real drawback. I need to find ways to stop thinking about analysis of algorithms, in order to do various other things that human beings ought to do.
— Donald Ervin Knuth, Selected Papers on Computer Science
People who don't like math always accuse mathematicians of trying to make math complicated. (...) But anyone who does love math knows it's really the opposite: math rewards simplicity, and mathematicians value it above all else. So it's no surprise that Walter's favourite axiom was also the most simple in the realm of mathematics: the axiom of the empty set. The axiom of the empty set is the axiom of zero. it states that there must be a concept of nothingness, that there must be the concept of zero: zero value, zero items. Math assumes there's a concept of nothingness, but is it proven? No. But it must exist.And if we're being philosophical—which we today are—we can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced as life. We assume the concept of nothingness, but we cannot prove it. But it must exist. So I prefer to think that Walter has not died but has instead proven for himself the axiom of the empty set, that he has proven the concept of zero. I know nothing else would have made him happier. An elegant mind wants elegant endings, and Walter had the most elegant mind. So I wish him goodbye; I wish him the answer to the axiom he so loved.
— Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful
— George E.P. Box, Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces
I don’t deny that it was more than a coincidence which made things turn out as they did, it was a whole train of coincidences. But what has providence to do with it? I don’t need any mystical explanation for the occurrence of the improbable; mathematics explains it adequately, as far as I’m concerned.Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the one will come up approximately 1,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable. But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term probability includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification.
— Max Frisch, Homo Faber
Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism is generally studied only by advanced students of physics, but Albert had mastered it by the time he was sixteen years old.
— Robert Cwiklik, Albert Einstein and the Theory of Relativity
Store speculates:Some creative people… of predominantly schizoid or depressive temperaments... use their creative capacities in a defensive way. If creative work protects a man from mental illness, it is a small wonder that he pursues it with avidity. The schizoid state... Is characterized by a sense of meaninglessness and futility. For most people, interaction with others provides most of what they require to find meaning and significance in life. For the schizoid person, however, this is not the case. Creative activity is a particularly apt way to express himself... The activity is solitary... [but] the ability to create and the productions which result from such ability are generally regarded as possessing value by our society.
— Sylvia Nasar
Two writings of al-Hassār have survived. The first, entitled Kitāb al-bayān wa t-tadhkār [Book of proof and recall] is a handbook of calculation treating numeration, arithmetical operations on whole numbers and on fractions, extraction of the exact or approximate square root of a whole of fractionary number and summation of progressions of whole numbers (natural, even or odd), and of their squares and cubes. Despite its classical content in relation to the Arab mathematical tradition, this book occupies a certain important place in the history of mathematics in North Africa for three reasons: in the first place, and notwithstanding the development of research, this manual remains the most ancient work of calculation representing simultaneously the tradition of the Maghrib and that of Muslim Spain. In the second place, this book is the first wherein one has found a symbolic writing of fractions, which utilises the horizontal bar and the dust ciphers i.e. the ancestors of the digits that we use today (and which are, for certain among them, almost identical to ours) [Woepcke 1858-59: 264-75; Zoubeidi 1996]. It seems as a matter of fact that the utilisation of the fraction bar was very quickly generalised in the mathematical teaching in the Maghrib, which could explain that Fibonacci (d. after 1240) had used in his Liber Abbaci, without making any particular remark about it [Djebbar 1980 : 97-99; Vogel 1970-80]. Thirdly, this handbook is the only Maghribian work of calculation known to have circulated in the scientific foyers of south Europe, as Moses Ibn Tibbon realised, in 1271, a Hebrew translation.[Mathematics in the Medieval Maghrib: General Survey on Mathematical Activities in North Africa]
— Ahmed Djebbar
From now on whenever I read a math book, I'm going to try to figure out by myself how everything was done, before looking at the solution. Even if I don't figure it out, I think I'll be able to see the beauty of a proof then.
— Donald E. Knuth
It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the same token, inconsistency is not an intrinsic property of any formal system.
— Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
And, believe me, if I were again beginning my studies, I should follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.
— Galileo Galilei
I took especially great pleasure in mathematics because of the certainty and the evidence of its arguments.
— René Descartes
See appendix A for a proof that Winston Churchill was a carrot.
— Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won't find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions. Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression - in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so.
— Yōko Ogawa
Woodrow Wilson, like most other educated Americans of his time, despised mathematics, complaining that "the natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be leaned by painful process of drill.
— Sylvia Nasar
Numbers written on restaurant bills within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe. This single fact took the scientific world by storm. It completely revolutionized it. So many mathematical conferences got held in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation died of obesity and heart failure and the science of maths was put back by years.
— Douglas Adams
Last period of the day. Charles had decided that morning that he would talk about tessellations. Last period, they should have been covering sines and cosines. They should have been starting to graph, but he just didn't have it in him. Tessellations were his favorite.
— Kaitlyn Greenidge, We Love You, Charlie Freeman
On Mars, the joke went, a man’s hole was his castle where values of castle approached dorm room.
— James S.A. Corey, Drive
...it would not be quite right to say that the problem is unsolvable in principle; only so complicated that it is not worth anybody’s time to think about it. So what do we do?In probability theory there is a very clever trick for handling a problem that becomes too difficult. We just solve it anyway by:(1)  making it still harder;(2)  redefining what we mean by ‘solving’ it, so that it becomes something we can do;(3)  inventing a dignified and technical-sounding word to describe this procedure, which has the psychological effect of concealing the real nature of what we have done, and making it appear respectable.
— E. T. Jaynes
Good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality.
— Saunders Mac Lane
Really, there was only one problem with Mr. Davis, as far as Gregory was concerned; He taught math.
— Greg Pincus, The 14 Fibs of Gregory K.
In the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead attempted to give a rigorous foundation to mathematics using formal logic as their basis. They began with what they considered to be axioms, and used those to derive theorems of increasing complexity. By page 362, they had established enough to prove "1 + 1 = 2.
— Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
Mathematics has always shown a curious ability to be applicable to nature, and this may express a deep link between our minds and nature. We are the Universe speaking out, a part of nature. So it is not so surprising that our systems of logic and mathematics sing in tune with nature.
— George Zebrowski
What is it, in fact, that we are supposed to abstract from, in order to get, for example, from the moon to the number 1? By abstraction we do indeed get certain concepts, viz. satellite of the Earth, satellite of a planet, non-self-luminous heavenly body, heavenly body, body, object. But in this series 1 is not to be met with; for it is no concept that the moon could fall under. In the case of 0, we have simply no object at all from which to start our process of abstracting. It is no good objecting that 0 and 1 are not numbers in the same sense as 2 and 3. What answers the question How many? is number, and if we ask, for example, "How many moons has this planet?", we are quite as much prepared for the answer 0 or 1 as for 2 or 3, and that without having to understand the question differently. No doubt there is something unique about 0, and about 1000; but the same is true in principle of every whole number, only the bigger the number the less obvious it is. To make out of this a difference in kind is utterly arbitrary. What will not work with 0 and 1 cannot be essential to the concept of number.
— Gottlob Frege
Mathematical knowledge is unlike any other knowledge. While our perception of the physical world can always be distorted, our perception of mathematical truths can’t be. They are objective, persistent, necessary truths. A mathematical formula or theorem means the same thing to anyone anywhere – no matter what gender, religion, or skin color; it will mean the same thing to anyone a thousand years from now. And what’s also amazing is that we own all of them. No one can patent a mathematical formula, it’s ours to share. There is nothing in this world that is so deep and exquisite and yet so readily available to all. That such a reservoir of knowledge really exists is nearly unbelievable. It’s too precious to be given away to the “initiated few.” It belongs to all of us.
— Edward Frenkel, Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality
Mathematics takes us still further from what is human into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual world, but ever possible world, must conform.
— Bertrand Russell
One thing the American defense establishment has traditionally understood very well is that countries don't win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost.
— Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful—‘important’ if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and ‘serious’ expresses what I mean much better
— G.H. Hardy
The ‘seriousness’ of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects. We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is ‘significant’ if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas. Thus a serious mathematical theorem, a theorem which connects significant ideas, is likely to lead to important advances in mathematics itself and even in other sciences.
— G.H. Hardy
REAL MATHEMATICS is not about just computing but it is about  figuring out…Figuring out the truthfulness, reasoning behind specific event, patterns, determinism in chaotic processes etc.
— Mathematician Vitthal Jadhav
How to describe the excitement I felt when I saw this beautiful work and realized its potential? I guess it's like when, after a long journey, suddenly a mountain peak comes in full view. You catch your breath, take in its majestic beauty, and all you can say is "Wow!" It's the moment of revelation. You have not yet reached the summit, you don't even know yet what obstacles lie ahead, but its allure is irresistible, and you already imagine yourself at the top. It's yours to conquer now. But do you have the strength and stamina to do it?
— Edward Frenkel, Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality
What did we know? This was early days. We had no idea what was out there. How dangerous it might be. It was just a school maths problem. They never asked that in the exams, did they? Like, “If John walks at three miles an hour from London to Brighton, and he's attacked by rabid grown-ups four times, and they bite his right leg off, how long will it take him to bleed to death?
— Charlie Higson, The Hunted
The geometer offers to the physicist a whole set of maps from which to choose. One map, perhaps, will fit the facts better than others, and then the geometry which provides that particular map will be the geometry most important for applied mathematics.
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
You’re probably better at math than I am, because pretty much everyone’s better at math than I am, but it’s okay, I’m fine with it. See, I excel at other, more important things—guitar, sex, and consistently disappointing my dad, to name a few. By the way, it's apparently true that you'll never use it in the real world. Math, I mean.
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
The play is independent of the pages on which it is printed, and ‘pure geometries’ are independent of lecture rooms, or of any other detail of the physical world.
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
It seems that mathematical ideas are arranged somehow in strata, the ideas in each stratum being linked by a complex of relations both among themselves and with those above and below. The lower the stratum, the deeper (and in general more difficult) the idea. Thus the idea of an ‘irrational’ is deeper than that of an integer; and Pythagoras’s theorem is, for that reason, deeper than Euclid’s.
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
In these days of conflict between ancient and modern studies, there must surely be something to be said for a study which did not begin with Pythagoras, and will not end with Einstein, but is the oldest and the youngest of all.
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
Add Snow White and her seven dwarfs,2 droids for Luke Skywalker, of course.1 true ring to rule them all. A decimal is a place to stall.Snow White's gone, the dwarfs alone.This system your next clue has shown.Now you might ask, this little key, Just what does it mean for me?Hold on tight and you will see, Someday it will set clues free.
— Megan Frazer Blakemore, The Friendship Riddle
Math is a very peculiar thing, for in it all numbers have a double but not all have halves.
— Willa Valentine
My dream is that all of us will be able to see, appreciate, and marvel at the magic beauty and exquisite harmony of these ideas, formulas, and equations, for this will give so much more meaning to our love for this world and for each other.
— Frenkel writes
I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our ‘creations’, are simply our notes of our observations. This view has been held, in one form or another, by many philosophers of high reputation from Plato onwards.
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
You’re probably better at math than I am, because pretty much everyone’s better at math than I am, but it’s okay, I’m fine with it. See, I excel at other, more important things—guitar, sex, and consistently disappointing my dad, to name a few.
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
I guess a sock is also a geometric shape—technically—but I don't know what you'd call it. A socktagon?
— Stephen King, Under the Dome
Everything can be summed up into an equation.
— Alexei Maxim Russell, Trueman Bradley - Aspie Detective
Programmers are not mathematicians, no matter how much we wish and wish for it.
— Richard P. Gabriel
I have stressed this distinction because it is an important one. It defines the fundamental difference between probability and statistics: the former concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities
—  the latter concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data.
Mathematics ... is indispensable as an intellectual technique. In many subjects, to think at all is to think like a mathematician.
— Robert Maynard Hutchins
That's because, if correct, a mathematical formula expresses an eternal truth about the universe. Hence no one can claim ownership of it; it is ours to share. Rich or poor, black or white, young or old - no one can take these formulas away from us. Nothing in this world is so profound and elegant, and yet so available to all.
— Edward Frenkel
Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler’s equation reaches down into the very depths of existence.
— Keith J. Devlin
In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.
— Bertrand Russell
More often than not, at the end of the day (or a month, or a year), you realize that your initial idea was wrong, and you have to try something else. These are the moments of frustration and despair. You feel that you have wasted an enormous amount of time, with nothing to show for it. This is hard to stomach. But you can never give up. You go back to the drawing board, you analyze more data, you learn from your previous mistakes, you try to come up with a better idea. And every once in a while, suddenly, your idea starts to work. It's as if you had spent a fruitless day surfing, when you finally catch a wave: you try to hold on to it and ride it for as long as possible. At moments like this, you have to free your imagination and let the wave take you as far as it can. Even if the idea sounds totally crazy at first.
— Edward Frenkel, Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality
the theorem of incompleteness . . . [shows] there is nothing on this level of existence that can fully explain this level of existence.
— Pat Cadigan, Mindplayers
...in pure mathematics the mind deal only with its own creations and imaginations. The concepts of number and form have not been derived from any source other than the world of reality. The ten fingers on which men learned to count, that is, to carry out the first arithmetical operation, may be anything else, but they are certainly not only objects that can be counted, but also the ability to exclude all properties of the objects considered other than their number-and this ability is the product of a long historical evolution based on experience. Like the idea of number, so the idea of form is derived exclusively from the external world, and does not arise in the mind as a product of pure thought.
— Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring: Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science
THINK, and do not sacrifice yourself to mathematical magic.
— West and Harrison
Proofs are to mathematics what spelling (or even calligraphy) is to poetry. Mathematical works do consist of proofs, just as poems do consist of words.
— V.I. Arnold
What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?
— David Eugene Smith
Only dead mathematics can be taught where competition prevails: living mathematics must always be a communal possession.
— Mary Everest Boole
Amusement if one of humankind's strongest motivational forces.
— Ivars Peterson, Islands of Truth: A Mathematical Mystery Cruise
There is a unique Math behind the very notion of life, I seek it.
— Soumi Ghosh
Math is my Passion. Engineering is my Profession.
— Wilfred James Dolor
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
— Henri Poincaré
To return to the general analysis of the Rosicrucian outlook. Magic was a dominating factor, working as a mathematics-mechanics in the lower world, as celestial mathematics in the celestial world, and as angelic conjuration in the supercelestial world. One cannot leave out the angels in this world view, however much it may have been advancing towards the scientific revolution. The religious outlook is bound up with the idea that penetration has been made into higher angelic spheres in which all religions were seen as one; and it is the angels who are believed to illuminate man's intellectual activities.In the earlier Renaissance, the magi had been careful to use only the forms of magic operating in the elemental or celestial spheres, using talismans and various rituals to draw down favourable influences from the stars. The magic of a bold operator like Dee, aims beyond the stars, aims at doing the supercelestial mathematical magic, the angel-conjuring magic. Dee firmly believed that he had gained contact with good angels from whom he learned advancement in knowledge. This sense of close contact with angels or spiritual beings is the hallmark of the Rosicrucian. It is this which infuses his technology, however practical and successful and entirely rational in its new understanding of mathematical techniques, with an unearthly air, and makes him suspect as possibly in contact, not with angels, but with devils.
— Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment