“Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.”
— Theodor Adorno

“I find that the whiter my hair becomes the more ready people are to believe what I say.”
— Bertrand Russell

“We are not won by arguments that we can analyse, but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.”
— Samuel Butler

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”
— E. O. Wilson

“Error is the price we pay for progress.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

“Evolution converts randomness into order and complexity.”
— Evolution: a simulation, by David Randall Miller

“What I have achieved has been largely a matter of chance. Many problems I thought about at length with no success. With other problems, there was the inspiration—indeed, some that astound me today.”
— Robert Langlands

“Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.”
— Yuval Noah Harari

“Everywhere one finds this miserable way of concluding from the special to the general, and it is extremely peculiar that such a procedure has led to do few of the so-called paradoxes.”
— Niels Henrik Abel

“Ask Jacobi or Gauss publicly to give their opinion, not as to the truth, but as to the importance of these theorems. Later there will be, I hope, some people who will find it to their advantage to decipher all this mess.”
— Évariste Galois; the closing lines of a letter he wrote to his friend, dated two days before he died.

“The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning, but imagination.”
— Augustus De Morgan

“No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never to be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it gives the impression of also being beautiful.”
— George Boole

“For any mathematical problem solving, it never hurts to start by giving things names.”
— 3Blue1Brown, But why is a sphere's surface area four times its shadow?

“Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
— Mary Oliver

“No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“As the prerogative of Natural Science is to cultivate a taste for observation, so that of Mathematics is, almost from the starting point, to stimulate the faculty of invention.”
— James Joseph Sylvester

“My definition of a scientist is that you can complete the following sentence: ‘he or she has shown that…’.”
— E. O. Wilson

“[Ideas] are like shadows — substantial enough until we try to grasp them.”
— Samuel Butler

“The chief danger to philosophy is narrowness in the selection of evidence.”
— Alfred North Whitehead

“There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.”
— Bertrand Russell

“So in all human affairs one notices, if one examines them closely, that it is impossible to remove one inconvenience without another emerging.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli