Bertrand Russell Quotes

Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare.

Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.

Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.

Truth is beauty

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has as yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we. The most distinct and beautiful statements of any truth must take at last the mathematical form. We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both.

Everything is so infinitely simple, so infinitely beautiful.

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

I want to paint something that's gorgeous, something that's perfect. So that it's full of sadness.

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

The ugly can achieve an absoluteness beyond the reach of beauty.

An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty.

It can be a work by Mondrian, a piece of music by Schönberg or Mozart, a painting by Leonardo, Barnett Newman or also Jackson Pollock. That's beautiful to me. But also nature. A person can be beautiful as well. And beauty is also defined as 'untouched'. Indeed, that's an ideal: that we humans are untouched and therefore beautiful.

I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty--and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.

The more perfect the approximation to truth, the more perfect is art.

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.

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.

The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.

It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.

Accuracy is essential to beauty.

If numbers aren't beautiful, I don't know what is.

I agree that two times two makes four is an excellent thing; but if we are dispensing praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes a most charming little thing as well.