Eric Temple Bell Quotes

As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

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 art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

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

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

Mathematics is really an art, not a science.

Metaphysical thinking will always no doubt be a strong element in her mentality, and it is to be hoped that she will never lose her great, her sovereign powers in that direction.

I am interested in ideas, not merely in visual products.

No matter how correct a mathematical theorem may appear to be, one ought never to be satisfied that there was not something imperfect about it until it also gives the impression of being beautiful.

When people ask me what it is about Brazil and my work, it's not something that I can say literally. It's unidentifiable. It's like when you do research and things inspire you. If you're smart enough, then obviously you don't take it literally. The inspiration will come out later somehow.

Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.

Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal to the growth of a masculine vigour of intellect.

In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color.

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.

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

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

Even before string theory, especially as physics developed in the 20th century, it turned out that the equations that really work in describing nature with the most generality and the greatest simplicity are very elegant and subtle.

My character Lena is somebody who responds to people in a very simple way. I didn't have to take myself off to a darkened room to concentrate, I just had to try and be open. It's an interesting, subtle relationship.

When works get too intellectual, they lose their intensity.

The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom.

The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.

I love the simplicity of the Cube because it's a very clear geometrical shape, and I love geometry because it's the study of how the whole universe is structured.

A piece of sculpture has to be more than a block of wood.