Thomas Aquinas: Since Mathematics is intermediate between natural and divine science, it is more certain than
either of them; ...
Bertrand Russell: Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as in a
intelligible super-sensible world.
Augustine: Seven and three are ten, not only now but always; nor was there ever a time when seven and three were
not ten, nor will there ever be a time seven and three will not be ten. I say, therefore, that this incorruptible truth of
number is common to me and to any reasoning person whatsoever.
John Adams: I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My
sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation,
commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture,
statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
Galileo: Nature's great book is written in mathematics.
George Washington: The science of figures, to ascertain degree, is not only indispensably requisite in every walk of
civilized life; but the investigation of mathematical truths accustoms the mind to method and correctness in reasoning,
and is an employment peculiarly worthy of rational beings. In a clouded state of existence, where some many things
appear precarious to the bewildered research, it is here that the rational faculties find a firm foundation to rest upon.
From the high ground of mathematical and philosophical demonstration, we are insensibly led to far more nobler
speculations and sublimer meditations.
Rene Descartes: I clearly see that existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than can its having its
three angles equal to two right angles be separated from the essence of a rectilinear triangle, ...
Johannes Kepler: Geometria est archetypus pulchritudinis mundi. (Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the
world.)
Thomas Mann: I tell them if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best
remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
Plato: No single instrument of youthful education has such mighty power, both as regards domestic economy and
politics, and in the arts, as the study of arithmetic. Above all, arithmetic stirs up who is by nature sleepy and dull, and
makes him quick to learn, retentive, shrewd, and aided by art divine he makes progress quite beyond his natural
powers.
Emmanuel Kant: It is commonly asserted that mathematics and philosophy differ from one another according to
their objects, the former treating of quantity, the latter of quality. All this is false. The difference between these
sciences cannot depend on their object; for philosophy applies to everything, hence also to quants, and so does
mathematics in part, in as much as everything has magnitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: We do not listen with the best regard to the verses of a man who is only a poet, nor to his problems if he is only an algebraist; but if a man is at once acquainted with the geometric foundation of things and with their festal splendor, his poetry is exact and his arithmetic musical.
Shakespeare:
Music and poesy used to quicken you:
The mathematics, and the metaphysics,
Fail to them as you find your stomach serves you.
No profit grows, where is no pleasure ta'en:-
In brief, sir study what you most affect.
Euripides: Mighty are numbers, joined with art resistless.
Spinoza: Persons who would rather abuse or deride human emotions than understand them ... will doubtless think it
strange that I should attempt to treat ... of the nature and strength of human emotions ... in exactly the the same
manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.
Goethe: Mathematicians are a species of Frenchmen: if you say something to them, they translate it into their own
language and presto! it is something different."
