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I have not in every case been able to avoid the use of the abbreviated and precise terminology of mathematics. To do so would have been to sacrifice matter to form; for the language of everyday life has not yet grown to be sufficiently accurate for the purposes of so exact a science as mechanics.

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Mathematics

More quotes by Ernst Mach

The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.

The aim of research is the discovery of the equations which subsist between the elements of phenomena.

Popular Scientific Lectures (1910)

Mathematical and physiological researches have shown that the space of experience is simply an actual case of many conceivable cases, about whose peculiar properties experience alone can instruct us.

Popular Scientific Lectures (1910)

All this, the positive and physical essence of mechanics, which makes its chief and highest interest for a student of nature, is in existing treatises completely buried and concealed beneath a mass of technical considerations.

The Science of Mechanics (1893)

The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example of the processes by which natural science generally is developed.

The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development (1893)

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

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

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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

Attribution

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