Morris Kline Quotes

The reason why we do maths is because it's like poetry. It's about patterns, and that really turned me on. It made me feel that maths was in tune with the other things I liked doing.

A beautiful dress can be as exciting as a poem.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

The Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes wrote that beauty is fundamental. Well, with the poet's permission, so is courage.

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Mathematics is one of the essential emanations of the human spirit, a thing to be valued in and for itself, like art or poetry.

The true spirit of delight...is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Poems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.

We are surrounded by poetry on all sides.

Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry.

Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable; less ordinary, pleasant; novel and ingenious ones, delightful. As pictures and statues, and living beauty, too, show better by music-light, so is poetry irradiated, vivified, glorified', and raised into immortal life by harmony.

Why then we should drop into poetry.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

The moment of change is the only poem.

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Well-written words are music.

I've always been interested in art, architecture, color.

If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.

Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

So much inspires me. People living their lives with courage, beauty of all kinds, nature in all its aspects, people I love and people I hardly know, and, of course, other poets.

I like the ideology of there being no such thing as perfection. But I'm of the opinion that I have witnessed perfection at various times, especially in art.

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.