Mathematics Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old mathematics quotes, mathematics sayings, and mathematics proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. G. H. Hardy
Mathematics is the cheapest science. Unlike physics or chemistry, it does not require any expensive equipment. All one needs for mathematics is a pencil and paper. George Polya
It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better. Henri Poincare
Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires. Iris Murdoch
Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things. Isaac Newton
The value of a problem is not so much coming up with the answer as in the ideas and attempted ideas it forces on the would be solver. Israel Nathan Herstein
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is. John von Neumann
The emphasis on mathematical methods seems to be shifted more towards combinatorics and set theory - and away from the algorithm of differential equations which dominates mathematical physics. John von Neumann
It is clear that the chief end of mathematical study must be to make the students think. John Wesley Young
Mathematics is the language of size. Lancelot Hogben
A man is like a fraction whose numerator is what he is and whose denominator is what he thinks of himself. The larger the denominator, the smaller the fraction. Leo Tolstoy
Whoever despises the high wisdom of mathematics nourishes himself on delusion and will never still the sophistic sciences whose only product is an eternal uproar. Leonardo da Vinci
A mathematical proof must be perspicuous. Ludwig Wittgenstein
Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. Nikola Tesla
The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. Norbert Wiener
The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics. Paul Halmos
There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. Paul Lockhart
The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics. Plato
The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened Richard Dawkins
It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics. Richard Dawkins
It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics. Richard Dawkins
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. Robert A. Heinlein
Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics. Simeon Denis Poisson
Though this be madness, yet there is method in't. William Shakespeare