"In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra. "
— Fran Lebowitz

"I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure."
— George Gordon Byron

"Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God."
— Maria Mitchell

"The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The object of pure Physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure Mathematic that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence."
— J.J. Sylvester

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

"I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh."
— Thomas Mann

"The shortest path between any two truths in the real domain passes through the complex domain."
— J. Hadamand

"When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring."
— Farkas Bolyai

"All mathematicians live in two different worlds. They live in a crystalline world of perfect platonic forms. An ice palace. But they also live in the common world where things are transient, ambiguous, subject to vicissitudes. Mathematicians go backward and forward from one world to another. They’re adults in the crystalline world, infants in the real one."
— Sylvain Cappell

"My beautiful proof lies all in ruins."
— Georg Cantor

"I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics...that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline."
— Alain Badiou (The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics)

"Soon after I began working for the Professor, I realized that he talked about numbers whenever he was unsure of what to say or do. Numbers were also his way of reaching out to the world. They were safe, a source of comfort."
— Yoko Ogawa (The Housekeeper and the Professor)

"Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species."
— Michael Crichton (The Lost World)

"Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications."
— Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park)

"The mathematicians are the priests of the modern world."
— Bill Gaede (Why God Doesn't Exist)

"A mathematician is an individual who constructs space with 0D particles and then places a bowling ball on this invisible canvas to explain how gravity works."
— Bill Gaede (Why God Doesn't Exist)

"A relativist is an individual who doesn't know the difference between an adjective and an adverb."
— Bill Gaede (Why God Doesn't Exist)

"A mathematician is a magician who converts adjectives into nouns: continuous into continuum, infinite into infinity, infinitesimal into location, 0D into point, 1D into line, curved into geodesic..."
— Bill Gaede (Why God Doesn't Exist)

"I couldn't claim that I was smarter than sixty-five other guys--but the average of sixty-five other guys, certainly!"
— Richard P. Feynman (Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character)

"A mathematician is an individual who constructs space with 0D particles and then places a bowling ball on this canvas to show how gravity works."
— Bill Gaede