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Euler calculated the force of the wheels necessary to raise the water in a reservoir … My mill was carried out geometrically and could not raise a drop of water fifty yards from the reservoir. Vanity of vanities! Vanity of geometry!

— Frederick II of Prussia

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Mathematics

More quotes by Frederick II of Prussia

A single Voltaire will do more honor to France than a thousand pedants, a thousand false wits, a thousand great men of inferior order.

Neither antiquity nor any other nation has imagined a more atrocious and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating God. — This is how Christians treat the autocrat of the universe.

It is a fact that princes who try to raise other princes with violence, end up destroying themselves.

I think it better to keep a profound silence with regard to the Christian fables, which are canonized by their antiquity and the credulity of absurd and insipid people.

The mountain is passed; now we shall get on better.

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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.

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