James Newman Quotes

As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then suchand such another proposition is true of that thing.... Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

Geometry is knowledge that appears to be produced by human beings, yet whose meaning is totally independent of them.

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.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

We both know that, my friend, but a man's perception soon becomes his reality.

There is no order of things except in the human mind.

The world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them.

Mathematics is a body of knowledge, but it contains no truths.

Do mathematics have a relation to reality or are they only a mathematical symbol?

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.

Everyone in your life is a figment of your imagination--ev en you.

Reality is not so much what happens to us; rather, it is how we think about those events that create the reality we experience. In a very real sense, this means that we each create the reality in which we live.

Look, boys, it ever strike you that the world not real at all? It ever strike you that we have the only mind in the world and you just thinking up everything else? Like me here, having the only mind in the world, and thinking up you people here, thinking up the war and all the houses and the ships and them in the harbour. That ever cross your mind?

The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want

Belief creates its own experience; therefore, such an experience is not true.

Life is simply what out feelings do to us.

At the beginning of the new millennium, we still do not know why mathematics is true and whether it is certain. But we know what we do not know in an immeasurably richer way than we did. And learning this has been a remarkable achievement-among the greatest and least-known of the modern era.

Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known.

Reality is fabricated out of desire.

Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.

If all sentient beings in the universe disappeared, there would remain a sense in which mathematical objects and theorems would continue to exist even though there would be no one around to write or talk about them. Huge prime numbers would continue to be prime, even if no one had proved them prime.

Every man carries with him the world in which he must live.