you know, for INSPIRATION. These have been saved in my Stickies for a long while. Maybe you will enjoy them. These have mostly been culled from internet quote sites; sorry the attributions are not more accurate.
About Math
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
G.H. Hardy
My brain is open.
Paul Erdos
The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God
Euclid
Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Geometry is perhaps the most elementary of the sciences that enable man, by purely intellectual processes, to make predictions (based on observation) about physical world. The power of geometry, in the sense of accuracy and utility of these deductions, is impressive, and has been a powerful motivation for the study of logic in geometry.
Coxeter
The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.
Galileo
The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Its symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to understand a single word; without which there is only a vain wandering through a dark labyrinth.
Some who had begun to read geometry with Euclid, when he had learned the first proposition, asked Euclid, “But what shall I get by learning these things?” whereupon Euclid called his slave and said “Give him three-pence since he must make gain out of what he learns.” — Stobaeus
Mathematicians aren’t satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity.
Andrew Wiles
Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty’s sake and pulls it down to earth.
Marston Morse
About Life
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. -George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
Simone de Beauvoir
We call these the 6Cs: collaboration (ability to work in teams, take perspective); communication (rhetoric, writing – beyond the 5 paragraph essay); content (including not just math and reading, but science and arts); critical thinking (that enables you to wisely sift through mountains of information); creative innovation (the ability to put information together in new ways) and confidence (making and learning from our mistakes).
http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/harvardquestions/?hp
“A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”
About Making Promises
“The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one’s self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course.”
Michelangelo
“Nothing weights lighter than a promise.”
Proverb, German
Promise little and do much. ~Hebrew Proverb
