Unknown
E. T. Bell
Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about.
E. T. Bell
'Obvious' is the most dangerous word in mathematics.
E. T. Bell
Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.
E. T. Bell
It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.
E. T. Bell
Intuition (male, female or mathematical) has been greatly overrated. Intuition is the root of all superstition.
E. T. Bell
If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.
E. T. Bell
If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics.
E. T. Bell
I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.
E. T. Bell
Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.
E. T. Bell
Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler.