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Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

— Bertrand Russell Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)

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Mathematics

More quotes by Bertrand Russell

Often and often, a marriage hardly differs from prostitution except by being harder to escape from.

Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918)

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.

A Free Man's Worship (1903)

My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.

Greek Exercises (1888)

Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.

Power: A New Social Analysis (1938)

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.

Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918)

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Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Núria Añó

Proof is the idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself.

Arthur Eddington The Nature of the Physical World (1928)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Bertrand Russell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.