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Stepping forward, I step back, the two steps, one forward and one back, canceling one another so that after they have been completed, I am where I started, having done something but accomplished little, a useful metaphor for a great many activities in life.

— David Berlinski A Tour of the Calculus (1995)

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More quotes by David Berlinski

The derivative is an artifact, the first of the great concepts of modern science that fails conspicuously to correspond to anything in real life.

A Tour of the Calculus (1995)

It is here, at this very moment when the first utterly trivial differential equation is solved, that the secret form of words is revealed that makes modern science possible.

A Tour of the Calculus (1995)

A mathematical argument, once understood, is in its capacity to compel belief a miracle of enlightened life.

A Tour of the Calculus (1995)

Then he said what I knew—what I had always known—he would say. It is what the dead always say, and it is the only thing they say.
“Remember me.”

A Tour of the Calculus (1995)

I have written this book in isolation, hardly talking to a soul, but unoppressed as well by campus codes or creeds, free to say what I want and when I want. It is a measure of the degradation that has overtaken American academic life that I should feel obliged to boast of such circumstances.

A Tour of the Calculus (1995)

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