Quotes from the Mathematical Quotations Server

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Bacon, Roger
For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.
Opus Majus part 4 Distinctia Prima cap 1, 1267.
In the mathematics I can report no deficience, except that it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the pure mathematics, in that they do remedy and cure many defects in the wit and faculties intellectual. For if the wit be too dull, they sharpen it; if too wandering, they fix it; if too inherent in the sense, they abstract it. So that as tennis is a game of no use in itself, but of great use in respect it maketh a quick eye and a body ready to put itself into all postures; so in the mathematics, that use which is collateral and intervenient is no less worthy than that which is principal and intended.
John Fauvel and Jeremy Gray (eds.) A History of Mathematics: A Reader, Sheridan House, 1987.

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Baker, H. F.
[On the concept of group:]
... what a wealth, what a grandeur of thought may spring from what slightbeginnings.
Florian Cajori, A History of Mathematics, New York, 1919, p 283.

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Bagehot, Walter
Life is a school of probability.
Quoted in J. R. Newman (ed.) The World of Mathematics, Simon and Schuster, New York,1956, p. 1360.

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Balzac, Honore de (1799 - 1850)
Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.

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Banville, John
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.
Quoted in a review of Samuel Beckett's Nohow On: I11 Seen I11 Said, Worstward Ho, in The New York Review of Books, August 13, 1992

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Bell, Eric Temple (1883-1960)
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.
In H. Eves Return to Mathematical Circles., Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1988.
Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.
Mathematics, Queen and Servant of Science, New York, 1951, p 164.
It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.
The Handmaiden of the Sciences.
[Book by that title.]
Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.
Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.
"Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics.
The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.
In H. Eves Mathematical Circles Squared, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1972.
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If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics.
In J. R. Newman (ed.) The World of Mathematics, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956, p. 308.
The longer mathematics lives the more abstract -- and therefore, possibly also the more practical -- it becomes.
In The Mathematical Intelligencer, vol. 13, no. 1, Winter 1991.
The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.
In R Crayshaw-Williams The Search For Truth, p. 191.
If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.
In H. Eves Mathematical Circles Revisited, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1971.
I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.
In H. Eves Mathematical Circles Adieu, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1977.

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Belloc, Hillaire (1870-1953)
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.
The Silence of the Sea

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Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832)
O Logic: born gatekeeper to the Temple of Science, victim of capricious destiny: doomed hitherto to be the drudge of pedants: come to the aid of thy master, Legislation.
In J. Browning (ed.) Works.

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Bernoulli, Daniel
...it would be better for the true physics if there were no mathematicians on earth.
In The Mathematical Intelligencer, v. 13, no. 1, Winter 1991.

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Bernoulli, Jacques (Jakob?) (1654-1705)
I recognize the lion by his paw.
[After reading an anonymous solution to a problem that he realized was Newton's solution.]
In G. Simmons, Calculus Gems, New York: McGraw Hill, 1992, p. 136