"Do you mean ter tell me," he growled at the Dursleys, "that this boy—this boy!—knows nothin' abou'—about ANYTHING?"
Harry thought this was going a bit far. He had been to school, after all, and his marks weren't bad.
"I know some things," he said. "I can, you know, do math and stuff.""
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone)

"Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them."
— Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time)

"Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people."
— Augusten Burroughs (Possible Side Effects)

"It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul."
— Sophia Kovalevskaya

"...but Piglet is so small that he slips into a pocket, where it is very comfortable to feel him when you are not quite sure whether twice seven is twelve or twenty-two."
— A. A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh: Library Edition)

"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is."
— John von Neumann

"Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth."
— Galileo Galilei

"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell."
— Augustine of Hippo

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems"
— Paul Erdos

"I'll tell you once,
and I'll tell you again.
There's always a prime
between n and 2n."
— Paul Erdos (Topics in the Theory of Numbers)

"Elodin proved a difficult man to find. He had an office in Hollows, but never seemed to use it. When I visited Ledgers and Lists, I discovered he only taught one class: Unlikely Maths. However, this was less than helpful in tracking him down, as according to the ledger, the time of the class was 'now' and the location was 'everywhere.'"
— Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind)

"When a student comes and asks, "Should I become a mathematician?" the answer should be no. If you have to ask, you shouldn't even ask."
— Paul Halmos

"On a plaque attached to the NASA deep space probe we [human beings] are described in symbols for the benefit of any aliens who might meet the spacecraft as “bilaterly symmetrical, sexually differentiated bipeds, located on one of the outer spiral arms of the Milky Way, capable of recognising the prime numbers and moved by one extraordinary quality that lasts longer than all our other urges—curiosity.”"
— David Wells

""Hal Incandenza has an almost obsessive dislike for deLint, whom he tells Mario he sometimes cannot quite believe is even real, and tries to get to the side of, to see whether deLint has a true z coordinate or is just a cutout or projection." "
— David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest: A Novel)

"Infinite is a meaningless word: except – it states / The mind is capable of performing / an endless process of addition."
— Louis Zukofsky

"God has the Big Book, the beautiful proofs of mathematical theorems are listed here."
— Paul Erdos

"It is impossible to be a mathematician
without being a poet in soul."
— Sophia Kovalevskaya

"It's spring, it's sixth grade, anything can happen."
— Ms. Judith Cochrane

"The sun is happy when you wear a dunce cap and turn random spotted animals into hexagons. But if you don't wear a dunce cap, the sun will be so annoyed it will set early."
— Chandra

"The greatest mathematics has the simplicity and inevitableness of supreme poetry and music, standing on the borderland of all that is wonderful in Science, and all that is beautiful in Art."
— Robert Turnbull

""A person's value is attached to a variable exponent.""
— David Bajo

"When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?"
— Enrico Bombieri

"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science."
— Lord Kelvin

"I can see patterns in events, and behaviors; in mathematics, I follow slower"
— Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel's Chosen)

"There is a largeness about mathematics that transcends race and time; mathematics may humbly help in the market-place, but it also reaches to the stars."
— Robert Turnbull

"the golden eternity is { }"
— Jack Kerouac (The Scripture of the Golden Eternity)

"There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science."
— Gauss

"If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behooves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics..."
— Roger Bacon (The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon)

"I don't believe that math and nature respond to democracy. Just because very clever people have rejected the role of the infinite, their collective opinions, however weighty, won't persuade mother nature to alter her ways. Nature is never wrong."
— Janna Levin (How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space)

"The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish."
— Alfred North Whitehead