Math Quotes

1. "As I said in my last book, birds are mean. They're the only pet that, when they escape, the owners are relieved. You can tell a species is evil by doing this simple math. If my blond lab Molly was the size of T-Rex, that would just mean more kibble, more work for the gardener in the backyard, and a harder time moving her to my wife's side of the bed at night. If birds were the size of a T-Rex, the streets would be littered with human remains."
Author: Adam Carolla

2. "I'm very good in math, and I'm a logical thinker. I don't get wrapped up in things or even wrapped up in myself."
Author: Alan C. Greenberg

3. "Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity."
Author: Alan Turing

4. "Logic, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion - thus:Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.Minor Premise: One man can dig a post-hole in sixty seconds; Therefore-Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a post-hole in one second.This may be called syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed."
Author: Ambrose Bierce

5. "I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about."
Author: Andrew Wiles

6. "Nothing is less applicable to life than a mathematical argument. A proposition expressed in numbers is definitely false or true. In all other relations, the truth is so mingled with the false that often only instinct can help us to decide among virtuous influences, sometimes equally as strong in one direction as in the other."
Author: Anne Louise Germaine De Staël

7. "Spending when the math's not there and the numbers aren't there and if they look in the social security trust fund, it's filled with IOUs because the government's been pilfering it for years on end. We have to do something. We have to start having this discussion."
Author: Ben Quayle

8. "I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics."
Author: Betrand Russell

9. "Forget math and peotry. Especially poetry."
Author: C. J. Redwine

10. "The digital clock that sat on the empty bookcase blinked insistently in the dim room. It was an hour and thirty-five minutes off, but Archie had never bothered to reset it, he just did the maths to calculate the time."
Author: Chelsea Cain

11. "The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality."
Author: David Hilbert

12. "Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty."
Author: Deepak Chopra

13. "Your calendar is made up of twelve munse, your clock is divided by twelve, but your math and currency is based on ten? That's the most backward thing I have ever heard."
Author: Donald Swan

14. "This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent."
Author: Douglas Adams

15. "Funny. The blazer, skirt and tie become automatically sexy the minute you leave school when you're eighteen or nineteen and pull it out for fancy-dress parties. But whilst you're still there, stewing through Math, unable to find anyone who'll let you sit next to them in the cafeteria, crying in the toilet stalls, you know what it represents and you can't bring yourself to make it look alluring. That would be traitorous and phoney. I knew I looked like shit and I was glad I did because that's how the twenty pounds of gray polyester and itchy navy wool made me feel."
Author: Emma Forrest

16. "What is Mathematics? A science that uses numbers to explain difficult situations of life. Not really! It is an art of seeing what many people cannot see."
Author: Femi Olalekan Komolafe

17. "When you make music, you're forming these invisible vibrations in the air into different shapes and consistencies and speeds in order to create music, and understanding how the math of that works just gives you more colors to paint with, and allows you to get to what you want quicker."
Author: Flea

18. "And so will I here state just plainly and briefly that I accept God. But I must point out one thing: if God does exist and really created the world, as we well know, he created it according to the principles of Euclidean geometry and made the human brain capable of grasping only three dimensions of space. Yet there have been and still are mathematicians and philosophers-among them some of the most outstanding-who doubt that the whole universe or, to put it more generally, all existence was created to fit Euclidean geometry; they even dare to conceive that two parallel lines that, according to Euclid, never do meet on earth do, in fact, meet somewhere in infinity. And so my dear boy, I've decided that I am incapable of understanding of even that much, I cannot possibly understand about God."
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

19. "Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics."
Author: G. H. Hardy

20. "However, the economics of our business continued to deteriorate. We barely escaped bankruptcy a year ago, and in the aftermath of that escape we had to make some even tougher decisions."
Author: Gerard Arpey

21. "No matter how clear things might become in the forest of story, there was never a clear-cut solution, as there was in math. The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a problem into another form. Depending on the nature and the direction of the problem, a solution might be suggested in the narrative. Tengo would return to the real world with that solution in hand. It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell. It served no immediate practical purpose, but it contained a possibility."
Author: Haruki Murakami

22. "Good people care more about people than food. They try to help people and don't give up even when they get hungry. Only bad people give up. But good people fix things. Good people stay good even when it's hard to. Even if they're sick or sad or they have to lose their favorite stuff. Even if they have to die. Good people see past their own fucking lives. They aren't just hunger and math. They aren't just animals. Good people are part of the Higher, good people are fuel for the sun."
Author: Isaac Marion

23. "So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving. The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

24. "Math and science were my favorite subjects besides theater."
Author: Jason Earles

25. "I did math in school, obviously. And I loved all my math teachers."
Author: Jayma Mays

26. "It's a simple matter of mathematics."
Author: Jean Lee Latham

27. "Of course, I write crime stories, and I have to describe violence and the aftermath of violence."
Author: Jeffery Deaver

28. "I'm skipping, but Cam doesn't have a class until this afternoon, so he's a good boy.""And your a bad boy?""Oh, I'm a bad, bad boy.""Yeah, as in bad at spelling, math, english, cleaning up after yourself, talking to people, and I could go on."
Author: Jennifer L. Armentrout

29. "I sat up. Slowly. Between the belly dancing, the fire, the visit to Dave and it's aftermath, the night had taken its toll.You look like crap!" Cole said merrily. "I like the hair though."He made a camera frame with his thumbs and forefingers and in the genie voice from Aladdin said, "Now what does this say to me? Homeless women? Tornado victim? Britney Spears? I've got it! Preschooler who's misplaced her gum!"I regarded him balefully. "You're a morning person, aren't you?"You make that sound like a bad thing."Not if you stop talking."
Author: Jennifer Rardin

30. "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is."
Author: John Von Neumann

31. "It followed that every act, whether the finding of a new proof for a complex mathematical problem or a twist of vision that turned one school of art into another was a result of endless failure."
Author: Jon Courtenay Grimwood

32. "Anyway.I'm not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven't actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn't good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, "But it's turtles all the way down!"I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises."
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

33. "Personne n'eût pensé à rester chez soi, et surtout personne ne songeait à remettre le pied au Roi Mathias, où des voix comminatoires se faisaient entendre. Que des murs aient des oreilles, passe encore, puisque c'est une locution qui a court dans le langage usuel... mais une bouche!..."
Author: Jules Verne

34. "My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history."
Author: Lawrence R. Klein

35. "I am encouraged as I look at some of those who have listened to their "different drum": Einstein was hopeless at school math and commented wryly on his inadequacy in human relations. Winston Churchill was an abysmal failure in his early school years. Byron, that revolutionary student, had to compensate for a club foot; Demosthenes for a stutter; and Homer was blind. Socrates couldn't manage his wife, and infuriated his countrymen. And what about Jesus, if we need an ultimate example of failure with one's peers? Or an ultimate example of love?"
Author: Madeleine L'Engle

36. "Marcus couldn't believe it. Dead. A dead duck. OK, he'd been trying to hit it on the head with a piece of sandwich, but he tried to do all sorts of things, and none of them had ever happened before. He'd tried to get the highest score on the Stargazer machine in the kabab shop on Hornsey road - nothing. He'd tried to read Nicky's thoughts by staring at the back of his head every maths lesson for a week - nothing. It really annoyed him that the only thing he'd ever achieved through trying was something he hadn't really wanted to do that much in the first place. And anyway, since when did hitting a bird with a sandwich ever kill it? People spend half their lives throwing things at the ducks in Regent's Park. How come he managed to pick a duck that pathetic?"
Author: Nick Hornby

37. "Le pays est devenue un territoire où les mathématiques ressemblent un jeu d'enfants: les actifs additionnent et les retraités soustraient."
Author: Núria Añó

38. "For scholars and laymen alike it is not philosophy but active experience in mathematics itself that can alone answer the question: What is mathematics?"
Author: Richard Courant

39. "Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly—yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25 and Littlewood a 30. To David Hilbert, the most eminent mathematician of the day, he assigned an 80. To Ramanujan he gave 100."
Author: Robert Kanigel

40. "Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics."
Author: Robert Quine

41. "No doubt there are some who, when confronted with a line of mathematical symbols, however simply presented, can only see the face of a stern parent or teacher who tried to force into them a non-comprehending parrot-like apparent competence--a duty and a duty alone--and no hint of magic or beauty of the subject might be allowed to come through."
Author: Roger Penrose

42. "In principle you could hypertunnel from a Zone B world, but in practice you can't get the tech together. The evil rays revel in chaotic class-three and class-four zones."--Rudy Rucker, story notes, Mathies in Love"
Author: Rudy Rucker

43. "But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead."
Author: Scarlett Thomas

44. "That said, a fireball like the one hurtling towards us was worthy of the utmost respect. To adopt the jargon of commercial managers, this was a Premium-Class Fireball. Speaking in poetic terms, it was a Tsar-Fireball. A biologist would have said it was an Alpha-Fireball. As a cool, calculating mathematician might have remarked, it was a fireball with a diameter of about three metres.It was a fireball fearsome enough to make you shit yourself!"
Author: Sergei Lukyanenko

45. "I have written a book called 'In the Wonderland of Numbers.' It's about a young girl, Neha, who is very poor in mathematics, but in a series of illusory experiences, she becomes a great mathematician."
Author: Shakuntala Devi

46. "Are you a vampire, Mathias?"He never blinked nor shifted his eyes from mine. "Yes."
Author: Shari Richardson

47. "I am big into aromatherapy."
Author: Sharon Stone

48. "What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that's been done by others before us. I didn't invent the language or mathematics I use. I make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It's about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can't write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That's what has driven me."
Author: Walter Isaacson

49. "Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary."
Author: William Adams

50. "But then, the sky! Blue, untainted by a single cloud (the Ancientes had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapour). I love - and i'm certain that i'm not mistaken if i say we love - skies like this, sterile and flawless! On days like these, the whole world is blown from the same shatterproof, everlasting glass as the glass of the Green Wall and of all our structures. On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality - which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects."
Author: Yevgeny Zamyatin

Math Quotes Pictures