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In many cases, mathematics is an escape from reality. The mathematician finds his own monastic niche and happiness in pursuits that are disconnected from external affairs. Some practice it as if using a drug.

— Stanislaw Ulam Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

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Mathematics

More quotes by Stanislaw Ulam

Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

The story that Dick Feynman could open safes whose combinations had been forgotten by their owners is true.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal.

It is like hidden parameters in physics, this ability that does not surface and that I like to call "habitual luck".

Adventures of a Mathematician - Third Edition (1991)

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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)

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing.

Bertrand Russell

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

Núria Añó

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