Arthur Cayley Quotes

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.

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.

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be for life - namely, Beauty.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

No – we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

The more people explore the world, the more they realize in every country there's a different aesthetic. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.

When I speak of the beauty of a game of chess, then naturally this is subjective. Beauty can be found in a very technical, mathematical game for example. That is the beauty of clarity.

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.

The traditional mathematician recognizes and appreciates mathematical elegance when he sees it. I propose to go one step further, and to consider elegance an essential ingredient of mathematics: if it is clumsy, it is not mathematics.

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

It is here [in mathematics] that the artist has the fullest scope of his imagination.

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.

Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward environment, it discovers a deeper and more real love-liness.

What a strange power the perception of beauty is! It seems to ebb and flow like some secret tide, independent alike of health and disease, of joy or sorrow. There are times in our lives when we seem to go singing on our way, and when the beauty of the world sets itself like a quiet harmony to the song we uplift.

One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

You do not need to know anything about a plant to know that it is beautiful.

Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

I think beauty is a feeling that you get after you've had an experience. It's the way you feel about it that is beautiful.