Percy W. Bridgman Quotes

God made the integers, man made the rest.

The mathematics is not there till we put it there.

That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.

[Mathematics] is an independent world created out of pure intelligence.

The science of mathematics presents the most brilliant example of how pure reason may successfully enlarge its domain without the aid of experience

In the pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together, and which will continue to exist there when the last of their radiant host shall have fallen from heaven.

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

Mathematics is not only real, but it is the only reality.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty-a beauty cold and austere ... yet sublimely pure and capable of stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

The whole of mathematics consists in the organization of a series of aids to the imagination in the process of reasoning.

The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric.

Mathematics is pure language - the language of science. It is unique among languages in its ability to provide precise expression for every thought or concept that can be formulated in its terms.

Arithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again.

Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare.

The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

You can't argue with math, Carter. You'll always lose.

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being.

We are not very pleased when we are forced to accept a mathematical truth by virtue of a complicated chain of formal conclusions and computations, which we traverse blindly, link by link, feeling our way by touch. We want first an overview of the aim and of the road; we want to understand the idea of the proof, the deeper context.

I found in rules of mathematics a peace and a trust that I could not place in human beings. This sublimation was total and remained total.

No employment can be managed without arithmetic, no mechanical invention without geometry.