Eric Temple Bell Quotes

By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics. Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.

It's such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really, for new ways of translating the beauty of it.

As the prerogative of Natural Science is to cultivate a taste for observation, so that of Mathematics is, almost from the starting point, to stimulate the faculty of invention.

Mathematics is not the rigid and rigidity-producing schema that the layman thinks it is; rather, in it we find ourselves at that meeting point of constraint and freedom that is the very essence of human nature.

Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject.

Experience proves that anyone who has studied geometry is infinitely quicker to grasp difficult subjects than one who has not.

What I can't create I don't understand

No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination.

The tantalizing discomfort of perplexity is what inspires otherwise ordinary men and women to extraordinary feats of ingenuity and creativity; nothing quite focuses the mind like dissonant details awaiting harmonious resolution.

Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.

To me, very much of what is artistic is people's very creative and inventive ways out of impossible situations.

Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.

People may say that what I do is very clever, but it's not really at all. It's not Swift.

Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

I've always enjoyed mathematics. It is the most precise and concise way of expressing any idea.

Prediction by analogy -creativity - is so pervasive we normally don't notice it.

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.

An idea is salvation by imagination.

For one person who is blessed with the power of invention, many will always be found who have the capacity of applying principles.

Fractions, decimals, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, mechanics - these are the steps up the mountain side. How high is one going to get? For me, the pinnacle was Projective Geometry. Who today has even heard of this branch of mathematics?

Not being given everything encourages you to create... That was one of the first steps for me learning to invent things.

I think math is exciting, you know.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.

Invention is activity of mind, as fire is air in motion; a sharpening of the spiritual sight, to discern hidden aptitudes.