Quotes by Mathematicians - Page 5

To teach how to live with uncertainty yet without being paralyzed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do.
Bertrand Russell
We sail within a vast sphere ever drifting in uncertainty driven from end to end.
Blaise Pascal
Hold on hold fast hold out. Patience is genius.
Georges de Buffon
Ah love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire Would not we shatter it to bits - and then Re-mold it nearer to the heart's desire!
Omar Khayyám
Noble deeds that are concealed are most esteemed.
Pascal
There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes but what our purposes are to be.
Norbert Weiner
Nothing is so exhausting as indecision and nothing is so futile.
Bertrand Russell
Choose always the way that seems the best however rough it may be custom will soon render it easy and agreeable.
Pythagoras
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past present and future state and at others whom it affects and see the relation of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
Blaise Pascal
Strange - is it not? - that of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.
Omar Khayyám
Most people would die sooner than think in fact they do.
Bertrand Russell
Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness.
Bertrand Russell
The average man's opinions are much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.
Bertrand Russell
The factor in human life provocative of a noble discontent is the gradual emergence of a sense of criticism founded upon appreciation of beauty and of intellectual distinction and of duty.
Alfred North Whitehead
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard chiefly I think because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
Bertrand Russell
Ah take the cash and let the credit go.
Omar Khayyám
God is in the world or nowhere creating continually in us and around us. Insofar as man partakes of this creative process does he partake of the divine of God and that participation is his immortality ....
Alfred North Whitehead
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
Blaise Pascal
In a free country there is much clamor with little suffering in a despotic state there is little complaint with much grievance.
Lazare Carnot
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
Alfred North Whitehead
Every man wherever he goes is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions which move with him like flies on a summer day.
Bertrand Russell
Not a sentence or a word is independent of the circumstances under which it is uttered.
Alfred North Whitehead
Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.
Marquis de Condorcet
To be able to concentrate for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement.
Bertrand Russell
If I have ever made any valuable discoveries it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.
Isaac Newton
Nothing of worthy or weight can be achieved with half a mind with a faint heart and with a lame endeavor.
Isaac Barrow
We are all afraid - for our confidence for the future for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man every civilization has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one has made the Ascent of Man.
Jacob Bronowski
A race preserves its vigour so long as it harbours a real contrast between what has been and what may be and so long as it is nerved by the vigour to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Alfred North Whitehead
A civilized society is one that exhibits the five qualities of truth beauty adventure art and peace.
Alfred North Whitehead
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
Alfred North Whitehead
Continuity in everything is unpleasant.
Blaise Pascal
With luck on your side you can do without brains.
Giordano Bruno
There is one basic cause of all effects.
Giordano Bruno
Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since at least half of the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell
Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell
It's a sobering thought: When Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.
Tom Lehrer
Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable and praised when they are not praiseworthy.
Bertrand Russell
Mathematics possesses not only truth but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere like that of a sculpture.
Bertrand Russell
The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Bertrand Russell
Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint and heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same door where in I went.
Omar Khayyám
Those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
No animal admires another animal.
Blaise Pascal
Our nature consists in motion complete rest is death.
Blaise Pascal
From the moment of birth we are immersed in action and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
Alfred North Whitehead
It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit divorced from it they remain barren.
Bertrand Russell
The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.
Bertrand Russell
It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Real life is to most men ... a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.
Bertrand Russell
The more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.
Bertrand Russell
Give me where to stand and I will move the earth.
Archimedes
Anything you're good at contributes to happiness.
Bertrand Russell
Every reader his or her book.Every book its reader.
S.R. Ranganathan
The centre of me is always and eternally in terrible pain ... A searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfiguring and infinite.
Bertrand Russell
The only kind of appeal that wins any instinctive response in party politics is an appeal to hostile feeling; the men who perceive the need of cooperation are powerless. Until education has been directed for a generation into new channels, and the Press has abandoned incitements to hatred, only harmful policies have any chance of being adopted in practice by our present political methods. But there is no obvious means of altering education and the Press until our political system is altered. From this dilemma there is no issue by means of ordinary action, at any rate for a long time to come. The best that can be hoped, it seems to me, is that we should, as many of us as possible, become political skeptics, rigidly abstaining from belief in the various attractive party programmes that are put before us from time to time.
Bertrand Russell
The skill of the politician consists in guessing what people can be brought to think advantageous to themselves; the skill of the experts consists in calculating what really is advantageous, provided people can be brought to think so. (The proviso is essential, because measures which arouse serious resentment are seldom advantageous, whatever merits they may have otherwise.) The power of the politician, in a democracy, depends upon his adopting the opinions which seem right to the average man. It is useless to urge that politicians ought to be high-minded enough to advocate what enlightened opinion considers good, because if they do they are swept aside for others.
Bertrand Russell
The special skill of the politician consists in knowing what passions can be most easily aroused, and how to prevent them, when aroused, from being harmful to himself and his associates...Moreover, since politicians are divided into rival groups, they aim at similarly dividing the nation, unless they have the good fortune to unite it in war against some other nation.
Bertrand Russell
Let us hope that Lysenko's success in Russia will serve for many generations to come as another reminder to the world of how quickly and easily a science can be corrupted when ignorant political leaders deem themselves competent to arbitrate scientific disputes.
Martin Gardner
Beware of finding what you're lookin
Richard Hamming
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it sho
Blaise Pascal
Whether at Naishápúr or Babylon, Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run, The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop, The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.
Omar Khayyám