Quotes from the Mathematical Quotations Server

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C�ine, Louis-Ferdinand (1894 - 1961)
Entre le p�is et les math�atiques... il n'existe rien. Rien! C'est le vide.
Voyage au bout de la nuit. Paris: Gallimard.

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Carmichael, R. D.
A thing is obvious mathematically after you see it.
In N. Rose (ed.) Mathematical Maxims and Minims, Raleigh NC: Rome Press Inc., 1988.

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Cauchy, Augustin-Louis (1789 - 1857)
Men pass away, but their deeds abide.
[His last words (?)]
In H. Eves Mathematical Circles Revisted, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1971.

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Cayley, Arthur
As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.
In J. R. Newman (ed.) The World of Mathematics, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.
Projective geometry is all geometry.
In J. R. Newman (ed.) The World of Mathematics, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.

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C�anne, Paul (1839 - 1906)
...treat Nature by the sphere, the cylinder and the cone...

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Chebyshev
To isolate mathematics from the practical demands of the sciences is to invite the sterility of a cow shut away from the bulls.
In G. Simmons, Calculus Gems, New York: Mcgraw Hill, Inc., 1992, page 198.

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Chekov, Anton (1860 - 1904)
There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.
In V. P. Ponomarev Mysli o nauke Kishinev, 1973.

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Chesterton, G. K. (1874 - 1936)
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
Orthodoxy ch. 2.
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
The Man who was Orthodox. 1963.
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
The Point of a Pin in The Scandal of Father Brown.

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Christie, Agatha
"I think you're begging the question," said Haydock, "and I can see looming ahead one of those terrible exercises in probability where six men have white hats and six men have black hats and you have to work it out by mathematics how likely it is that the hats will get mixed up and in what proportion. If you start thinking about things like that, you would go round the bend. Let me assure you of that!"
The Mirror Crack'd. Toronto: Bantam Books, 1962.
I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours I found it quite enthralling.
An Autobiography.

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Churchill, [Sir] Winston Spencer (1874-1965)
It is a good thing from an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
Roving Commission in My Early Life. 1930.
I had a feeling once about Mathematics - that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me - the Byss and Abyss. I saw - as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show - a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable but it was after dinner and I let it go.
In H. Eves Return to Mathematical Circles, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1988.