Christopher Wren Quotes

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

I am not a mathematician, but I was aware that for centuries, mathematics was considered the queen of the sciences because it claimed certainty. It was grounded on some fundamental certainties - axioms - that led to others.

You can't criticize geometry. It's never wrong.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

I'm a max player. Don't get mad at me because I'm telling you what's real. One plus one is two, all day long, and it's never gonna change. And that's factorial.

The man who has learned that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four" ... If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not.

Sometimes when persons say definitely it sounds actually less true.

Logic is the foundation of the certainty of all the knowledge we acquire.

Biology is a way of approaching the truth about the mind. In biology most people don't tackle problems at the level of complexity that psychoanalysis does. But psychoanalysis has a degree of uncertainty about it. A psychoanalyst may have some deep insights, but cannot, at the moment, run experiments to establish whether it's really the truth.

To know is always better, no matter what the answer might be.

In the absence of truth there is confusion, the essence of truth.

We cannot ... prove geometrical truths by arithmetic.

As Bertrand Russell once wrote, two plus two is four even in the interior of the sun.

Mathematics is distinguished from all other sciences except only ethics, in standing in no need of ethics.

Only God knows that. He is the only one who knows. He is only one who will know. And he is the only one who does know.

I've learned a long time ago, you don't say anything for absolutely certain.

doubts, like facts, are stubborn things.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

One of the nice things about math and science is it’s obvious, you get the answer or you don’t get the answer.

There's math, and everything else is debatable!