Eric Temple Bell

"Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.

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.

Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.

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.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

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.

I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.