Quotation:
"Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance."
More quotes from: E. T. Bell
- "Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest ..."
- "All of these dislikes and objections are of course themselves meaningless unless they can be ..."
- "Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine ..."
- "Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler. "
- "Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of ..."
- "I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, ..."
- "If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the ..."
- "If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on ..."
- "Intuition (male, female or mathematical) has been greatly overrated. Intuition is the root of all ..."
- "It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting ..."
- "'Obvious' is the most dangerous word in mathematics. "
- "Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a ..."
- "Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth. "
- "The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which ..."
- "The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical ..."
- "The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities ..."
- "The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a ..."
- "Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after ..."
- "Wherever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos. "


