Sunday, July 19, 2009

Mathematics

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty -- a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show."
- Bertrand Russell

"The mathematician does not study pure mathematics because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it and he delights in it because it is beautiful."
- Henri Poincare

"Similarly, mathematics can achieve a proof that has no interaction with the physical world. It may even be the closest to divine truth that human beings can achieve."
- Andrew Sullivan

Solitude

"He who delights in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."
- Francis Bacon

"I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind."
- Albert Einstein

"Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone."
- Paul Tillich

Politics

"The word 'bipartisan' usually means that some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out."
- George Carlin

Meditation

"The birds have vanished in the sky, and now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains."
- Li Po

Effort

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."
- Theodore Roosevelt

Freedom

"Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils."
- John Stark