Quotes by Mathematicians - Page 3

What men want is not knowledge but certainty.
Bertrand Russell
The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
Alfred North Whitehead
The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today.
Lewis Carroll
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
Now here you see it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else you must run at least twice as fast as that!
Lewis Carroll
The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.
Norbert Wiener
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is very important.
Bertrand Russell
I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.
Bertrand Russell
Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.
Blaise Pascal
We one and all of us have an instinct to pray and this fact constitutes an invitation from God to pray.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Give me a lever long enough And a prop strong enough I can single-handed move the world.
Archimedes
The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used.
Alfred North Whitehead
All this of Pot and Potter - Tell me then Who is the Potter pray and who the Pot?
Omar Khayyám
We think in generalities but we live in detail.
Alfred North Whitehead
Illusory joy is often worth more than genuine sorrow.
René Descartes
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot
To teach how to live with uncertainty and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can still do for those who study it.
Bertrand Russell
Three passions simple but overwhelmingly strong have governed my life: the longing for love the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Bertrand Russell
It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead
Science is what you know philosophy is what you don't know.
Bertrand Russell
If peace cannot be maintained with honor it is no longer peace.
Lord Russell
Never think that God's delays are God's denials. Hold on hold fast hold out. Patience is genius.
Comte de Buffon
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
Blaise Pascal
The fundamental defect of fathers is that they want their children to be a credit to them.
Bertrand Russell
A book of Verses underneath the Bough A Jug of Wine a Loaf of Bread - and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness - Oh Wilderness were Paradise enow!
Omar Khayyám
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
It is preoccupation with possession more than anything else that prevents men from living freely and nobly.
Bertrand Russell
Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty.
Bertrand A. Russell
Beggars do not envy millionaires though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful.
Bertrand Russell
Great and small suffer the same mishaps.
Blaise Pascal
Force and not opinion is the queen of the world but it it opinion that uses the force.
Pascal
One should respect public opinion in so far as it is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Bertrand Russell
If you want people to think well of you do not speak well of yourself.
Blaise Pascal
The power of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special efforts but by his ordinary doing.
Blaise Pascal
If the nose of Cleopatra had been a little shorter the whole face of the world would have been changed.
Pascal
There was the door to which I found no key There was the veil through which 1 might not see.
Omar Khayyám
From the intrinsic evidence of His creation the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician .
Sir James Jeans
We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves we desire to live an imaginary life in the minds of others and for this purpose we endeavor to shine.
Blaise Pascal
Lust and force are the source of all our actions lust causes voluntary actions force involuntary ones.
Blaise Pascal
Sometimes I have believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Lewis Carroll
Tut tut child said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral if only you can find it."
Lewis Carroll
We have two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice and the other which we practice but seldom preach.
Bertrand Russell
What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.
Alfred North Whitehead
Ah take the Cash and let the Credit go Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!
Omar Khayyám
There was never any reason to believe in any innate superiority of the male except his superior muscle.
Bertrand Russell
Two things control man's nature: instinct and experience.
Blaise Pascal
Biography is one of the new terrors of death.
John Arbuthnot
The secret of happiness is this: Let your interests be as wide as possible and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
Bertrand Russell
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Bertrand Russell
And this I know whether the one True Light Kindle to Love or Wrath consume me quite One flash of it within the Tavern caught Better than in the temple lost outright.
Omar Khayyám
Ah Love! could you and I with him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire Would we not shatter it to bits - and then Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire?
Omar Khayyám
To fear love is to fear life and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
The good life as I conceive it is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Bertrand Russell
Life is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.
Alfred North Whitehead
The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.
Jacob Bronowski
Real life is to most men a long second best a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Bertrand Russell
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.
Pascal
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
In all affairs love religion politics or business it's a healthy idea now and then to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted.
Bertrand Russell
Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.
Alfred N. Whitehead