Calculus Quotes

1. "Calculus was not math. It was a fucking science experiment gone wrong."
Author: Abbi Glines

2. "Everyone hated Calculus. Quadratic equations, parabolas, logarithms, trigonometry - you name it. It was like floating in an endless, frictionless void traveling at x miles per hour at a descension rate of one half the speed of gravity. Solve for x."
Author: Andrew Sturm

3. "We've developed algorithms for orgasms, broken it down to a science, I spell out equations on the small of your back, your kisses, the most beautiful calculus I've ever studied. You do fractions and long handed division up my thighs, balance equations between my legs...even my sharp clefts and C-notes can't match our depths..."
Author: Brandi L. Bates

4. "But here, Ms. Pelletier, is the thing. Without infinitesimals, the calculus as we know and love it simply wouldn't exist. It is these nearly-zero, sort-of-zero, sometimes-zero quantities that allow us to understand the world. Something which seems to be nearly nothing turns out to be crucial to everything. So though I, or for you that matter, or any of us, may be, as a collection of atoms, practically indistinguishable from zero, this does not necessarily mean we are insignificant. Indeed, it may be that we are actually crucially important."
Author: Brendan Halpin

5. "And then he was there, staring at me from behind the screen door. I'd like to say he no longer affected me, that seeing him was a disappointment. But it wasn't true. I felt as strongly about him as I had on that first day I'd seen him in calculus class."
Author: Candace Bushnell

6. "No matter how significant or life-changing your greatest hit or miss might be, neither even begins to define who you are. Each of us is a product of all our experiences and all our interactions with other people. To cite calculus, we are the area under the curve."
Author: Colin Powell

7. "I was always very strong in math, physics and calculus."
Author: Debi Thomas

8. "Usually, girls weren't encouraged to go to college and major in math and science. My high school calculus teacher, Ms. Paz Jensen, made math appealing and motivated me to continue studying it in college."
Author: Ellen Ochoa

9. "Accordingly, we find Euler and D'Alembert devoting their talent and their patience to the establishment of the laws of rotation of the solid bodies. Lagrange has incorporated his own analysis of the problem with his general treatment of mechanics, and since his time M. Poinsot has brought the subject under the power of a more searching analysis than that of the calculus, in which ideas take the place of symbols, and intelligent propositions supersede equations."
Author: Euler

10. "The teacher manages to get along still with the cumbersome algebraic analysis, in spite of its difficulties and imperfections, and avoids the smooth infinitesimal calculus, although the eighteenth century shyness toward it had long lost all point."
Author: Felix Klein

11. "Immortality is often ridiculous or cruel: few of us would have chosen to be Og or Ananias or Gallio. Even in mathematics, history sometimes plays strange tricks; Rolle figures in the textbooks of elementary calculus as if he had been a mathematician like Newton; Farey is immortal because he failed to understand a theorem which Haros had proved perfectly fourteen years before; the names of five worthy Norwegians still stand in Abel's Life, just for one act of conscientious imbecility, dutifully performed at the expense of their country's greatest man. But on the whole the history of science is fair, and this is particularly true in mathematics. No other subject has such clear-cut or unanimously accepted standards, and the men who are remembered are almost always the men who merit it. Mathematical fame, if you have the cash to pay for it, is one of the soundest and steadiest of investments."
Author: G.H. Hardy

12. "In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person's absence will affect you more than another's."
Author: Gayle Forman

13. "Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. (Dreams In The Witch-House)"
Author: H.P. Lovecraft

14. "In such a wild, uncharted place the book of God was vital, for it nourished their spirit and laid boundaries for their conduct. Other subjects simply had no relevance. Trigonometry and calculus would not help them find their way among the mountain trails. Adam Smith's economics were of no consequence in the matter of planting corn and breeding cattle. Nor did they need the essays of Plato or the plays of Shakespeare to teach them how to shoot a rifle, or to make clothes from animal skins, or to clear away the wilderness with their own bare hands."
Author: James Webb

15. "Tell them you came, and saw, and lookedinto my eyes and saw the shadowof the guard receding.Thoughts in time and out of season,the hitchinker stood by the side of the roadand levelled his thumb in thecalm calculus of reason.[...] Why does my mind circle around you?Why do planets wonder what itwould be like to be you?All your soft wild promises were words,birds, endlessly in flight."
Author: Jim Morrison

16. "Dude, you're such a geek. And that's coming from an overweight Star Trek fan who scored a 5 on the AP Calculus test. So you know your condition is grave"
Author: John Green

17. "You can't teach calculus to a chimpanzee. So just share your banana."
Author: John Rachel

18. "Each person possesses and inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests. The only thing that permits us to acquiesce in an erroneous theory is the lack of a better one; analogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice. Being first virtues of human activities, truth and justice are uncompromising."
Author: John Rawls

19. "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests."
Author: John Rawls

20. "Normal. She wanted normal and so did I. "You know what's normal?""What?" She wiped away her remaining tears. "Calculus."
Author: Katie McGarry

21. "She gave me the same smile I'd seen on Saturday night. That type of smile caused men to write those pussy-ass songs that Isaiah and I made fun of. I'd sit in Mrs. Collins's office for hours and wake my ass up early to go to calculus in order to see that smile again."
Author: Katie McGarry

22. "Newton, of course, was the inventor of differential calculus so his place in the tale is quite special."
Author: Kit Williams

23. "...magic was ugly—-a hard bargain with the universe, a calculus of pain."
Author: Laini Taylor

24. "Cam was so much clearer, easier to figure out. Like he was algebra and Daniel was calculus."
Author: Lauren Kate

25. "If life on death row is safer than life on the streets, it's hard to believe that the fear of execution is a driving force in a criminal's calculus."
Author: Levitt And Dubner

26. "For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules."
Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein

27. "We liked to be known as the clever girls. When we decorated our hands with henna for holidays and weddings, we drew calculus and chemical formulae instead of flowers and butterflies."
Author: Malala Yousafzai

28. "Though blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—graceful, unreasonable, and impractical no matter what she was draped over—she was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She was neither a flat nor solid shape. She showed no symmetry at all. Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless. Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, the silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory—Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot—she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square."
Author: Marisha Pessl

29. "I studied calculus for the first time, which to me was an amazingly empowering experience which I could really see how you could understand all sorts of things, and I decided that chemistry and biology just had too much memory for me to be interested. Physics was very easy."
Author: Marshall Nicholas Rosenbluth

30. "This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on."
Author: Marvin Minsky

31. "Writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so."
Author: Michael Chabon

32. "Foreshadowings of the principles and even of the language of [the infinitesimal] calculus can be found in the writings of Napier, Kepler, Cavalieri, Fermat, Wallis, and Barrow. It was Newton's good luck to come at a time when everything was ripe for the discovery, and his ability enabled him to construct almost at once a complete calculus."
Author: Napier

33. "Imagine a life-form whose brainpower is to ours as ours is to a chimpanzee's. To such a species, our highest mental achievements would be trivial. Their toddlers, instead of learning their ABCs on Sesame Street, would learn multivariable calculus on Boolean Boulevard. Our most complex theorems, our deepest philosophies, the cherished works of our most creative artists, would be projects their schoolkids bring home for Mom and Dad to display on the refrigerator door."
Author: Neil DeGrasse Tyson

34. "The analytical geometry of Descartes and the calculus of Newton and Leibniz have expanded into the marvelous mathematical method—more daring than anything that the history of philosophy records—of Lobachevsky and Riemann, Gauss and Sylvester. Indeed, mathematics, the indispensable tool of the sciences, defying the senses to follow its splendid flights, is demonstrating today, as it never has been demonstrated before, the supremacy of the pure reason."
Author: Nicholas Murray Butler

35. "Hey, Tate. Do you just screw in the locker room or do you do blowjobs as well?" Hannah Forrest, queen bee of the mean girls, shouted to my back while I walked to Calculus. Her drones laughed with her. I spun around to face them and held my hand to my heart. "And steal all of your business?" I took the time to enjoy their dumbstruck looks before I twisted on my heel and headed to class."
Author: Penelope Douglas

36. "I did not take a calculus course until my second year of college."
Author: Robert Coleman Richardson

37. "Printing mistakes adds value because of the probability calculus, which makes their intrusion into something problematic and almost impossible, even when everything's conceived, precisely, to avoid the intrusion of human error."
Author: Romain Gary

38. "That is what is marvelous about school, she realized: when you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless. You ace a math test: you will one day work for NASA. The choir director asks you to sing a solo at the holiday concert: you are the next Mariah Carey. You score a goal, you win a poetry contest, you act in a play. And you are everything at once: actor, astronomer, gymnast, star. But at a certain point, you begin to feel your talents dropping away, like feathers from a molting bird. Cello lessons conflict with soccer practice. There aren't enough spots on the debating team. Calculus remains elusive. Until the day you realize that you cannot think of a single thing you are wonderful at."
Author: Sarah Shun Lien Bynum

39. "I was more interested in skating and the girls and traveling than I was in calculus."
Author: Scott Hamilton

40. "If you put it as 'complex nervous systems' it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry... to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked 'What's so special about humans...?', I'm at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don't see why we'd be special… because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I'm not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point....I could pose the same kinds of questions of you... So God says, 'You are guys are really, really special.' How does his saying it make us special? 'But you see, he gave us a soul.' How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say… 'What's so special about that?"
Author: Shelly Kagan

41. "History was easy, but I don't know about the Calculus. It seemed like it was making sense, so that probably means I failed."
Author: Stephenie Meyer

42. "Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio - all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another."
Author: Steven Johnson

43. "Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in a capitalist society, a society that increasingly restricts the scope and credibility of appeals to ethical principle, in which it is thought foolish not to subject one's actions to the calculus of self-interest and profitability. War-making is one of the few activities that people are not supposed to view 'realistically'; that is, with an eye to expense and practical outcome. In all-out war, expenditure is all-out, unprudent--war being defined as as an emergency in which no sacrifice is excessive."
Author: Susan Sontag

44. "...love knows not of death nor calculus above the simple sum of heart plus heart."
Author: Sylvia Plath

45. "He calculated the number of bricks in the wall, first in twos and then in tens and finally in sixteens. The numbers formed up and marched past his brain in terrified obedience. Division and multiplication were discovered. Algebra was invented and provided an interesting diversion for a minute or two. And then he felt the fog of numbers drift away, and looked up and saw the sparkling, distant mountains of calculus."
Author: Terry Pratchett

46. "...film and calculus, both pornographies of flight."
Author: Thomas Pynchon

47. "Gout produces calculus in the kidney... the patient has frequently to entertain the painful speculation as to whether gout or stone be the worst disease. Sometimes the stone, on passing, kills the patient, without waiting for the gout."
Author: Thomas Sydenham

48. "Rain is the last thing you want when you're chasing someone in Miami. They drive shitty enough as it is, but on top of that, snow is a foreign concept, which means they never got the crash course in traction judgment for when pavement slickness turns less than ideal. And because of the land-sea temperature differential, Florida has regular afternoon rain showers. Nothing big, over in a jiff. But minutes later, all major intersections in Miami-Dade are clogged with debris from spectacular smash-ups. In Northern states, snow teaches drivers real fast about the Newtonian physics of large moving objects. I haven't seen snow either, but I drink coffee, so the calculus of tire-grip ratio is intuitive to my body."
Author: Tim Dorsey

49. "Love was actually more like calculus or physics. What was the half-life of love? Did it have cosigns and slopes, or quarks that morphed from wave to particle faster than you could say, please don't leave?"
Author: Trebor Healey

50. "Long after, as Jeremiah processed the destruction of Jerusalem that Solomon had set in motion, Jeremiah reduced the calculus of power and truth to a lean formula with two sets of triads: Do not let the wise boast in their wisdom, do not let the mighty boast in their might, do not let the wealthy boast in their wealth; but let those who boast in this, that they understand and know me, that I am the LORD; I act with steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, says the LORD. (Jer. 9:23–24)13"
Author: Walter Brueggemann

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