"If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics." - Francis Bacon

"There is no royal road to geometry." - Euclid, (said to Ptolemy I), quoted in Proclus, Commentary on Euclid

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts - for support rather than for illumination." - Andrew Lang

"A point is the beginning of magnitude." - Euclid (fl. 300 B.C.)

"They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one or more dimension--as a square is cut from a cube, or a circle from a sphere." - Lovecraft, H. P. in 'Through the Gates of the Silver Key', 'Omnibus 1: At the Mountains of Madness'

"I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning." - Plato (c428-348 B.C.) in 'The Republic', book VII,531-E

"One has to be able to count, if only so that at fifty one doesn't marry a girl of twenty." - MAXIM GORKY, The Zykovs

"The knowledge of numbers is one of the chief distinctions between us and the brutes." - LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU, letter (1753)

"Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." - BERTRAND RUSSELL, Mysticism and Logic

"Mathematics . . . possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture." - BERTRAND RUSSELL, The Study of Mathematics

"What would life be without arithmetic, but a scene of horrors?" - SYDNEY SMITH, letter (1835)