Math Pythagoras Quotes & Sayings

Geometry has two great treasures; one is the Theorem of Pythagoras; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel. — Johannes Kepler

Believe me, if Archimedes ever had the grand entrance of a girl as pretty as Gloria to look forward to, he would never have spent so much time calculating the value of Pi. He would have been baking her a Pie! If Euclid had ever beheld a vision of loveliness like the one I see walking into my anti-math class, he would have forgotten all the geometry of lines and planes, and concentrated on the sweet simplicity of soft curves. If Pythagoras had ever had a girl look at him the way Gloria's eyes fix in my direction, he would have given up his calculations on the hypotenuse of right triangles and run for the hills to pick a bouquet of wildflowers. — David Klass

The building, it so happened, was a music college of the kind she herself had left two years before, abandoning her lifelong hopes of becoming a professional musician; she recognised the piece as the D minor fugue from Bach's *French Suites*, a piece she had always loved and that caused her, hearing it so unexpectedly, to feel there on the pavement the most extraordinary sense of loss. It was though the music had once belonged to her and now no longer did; as though she had been excluded from its beauty, was being forced to see it in the possession of someone else, and to revisit in its entirety her own sadness at her inability, for a number of reasons, to remain in that world. — Rachel Cusk

I am sick of playing games where you're not allowed to show how you feel. I don't have to play anymore. He just won. — Kirsty Eagar

You should help a man to take up a burden, but you should not help him put it back down. — Pythagoras

Where they were going was a pigeon-shitted old bank building on an especially run-down stretch of the Bowery, — Garth Risk Hallberg

It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn't dying. — Miranda July

For somebody who loves foreign policy, being Secretary is the best job in the world - but it doesn't happen twice. — Madeleine Albright

Gradually, at various points in our childhoods, we discover different forms of conviction. There's the rock-hard certainty of personal experience ("I put my finger in the fire and it hurt,"), which is probably the earliest kind we learn. Then there's the logically convincing, which we probably come to first through maths, in the context of Pythagoras's theorem or something similar, and which, if we first encounter it at exactly the right moment, bursts on our minds like sunrise with the whole universe playing a great chord of C Major. — Philip Pullman

Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day. — Gian-Carlo Rota

Some doomsayers think the collapse will be triggered by runaway government spending, excessive taxation, oppressive regulation, food shortages, fuel shortages or natural disasters such as deadly pandemics or lethal changes in the world's climate. — Robert Higgs

Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons. — Pythagoras

thing, "Typhoon and the Tor Bay" it was called, — The Paris Review

What is a medium like telepresence but the extension--no, the very definition--of ourselves? Are we, who live things at a distance, the same species as our ancestors, we could hear of events in the same town only by going there? If you met a person from that time, would you have any more in common with him than with a whale, or a chimpanzee? You have traveled to meet me with better than seven-league boots; and I have done more math this morning than Pythagoras, and Euclid, and all Ancient Greece and Rome. Surely, if we are human, they were animals; and we a race of gods, if they were men. — Raphael Carter

She knew his secret: for all his wandering, his independence and his unorthodox ways, he took his responsibilities very seriously. He even borrowed others' responsibilities, making them his own simply because he thought this sort of service was owed to those whom he loved. — Meredith Duran

Competition is a moral problem and an emotional tangle and a political conundrum. — Valerie Miner

Number was the substance of all things. — Pythagoras

Like most religious mathematicians from Pythagoras to Godel, Bolzano believes that math is the Language of God and that profound metaphysical truths can be derived and proved mathematically. — David Foster Wallace

I enjoyed working with Peter, I was very pleased when I heard he was going to be the Doctor. — Sarah Sutton

I can be capable of anything if I allow myself to be. I really realized what an obstacle I was being in my own life. — Erin Willett

We come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing ... We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say that everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature. — Neil Postman

Numbers rule the universe. — Pythagoras

I think I had a kind of pause for insight in my 20s when I wasn't in a relationship and my career wasn't going the way I wanted it to go. I had time for reflection then. — Ray Liotta