Quotes from Robert Kaplan

True, they (numbers) are our invention and we have free will: but only to act compatibly with the world we've made.

For anything with a name(and zero had so many) surely existed......Yet how could what doesn't exist, exist?

Those wonderful coincidences of sound and sense between one language and another were also at work, giving each new term an alluring resonance.

Just as the rag doll wanted to be an eagle, the donkey a lion and the monkey a queen, the zero put on airs and pretended to be a digit.

Will it be the idea of absence of any number-or the idea of a number for such absence? Is it to be the mark of the empty, or the empty mark?

Beyond it is the incalculable. In other words, numbers cannot exceed the number of things there are: so that for the teller and the audience of this tale, numbers still are attached to objects.

If you look at zero, you see nothing ; but look through it and you will see the world.

In autumn velvety shawls of maroon and sienna drape hillsides that fold down upon willow-braided streams.

We realize that anything can be everything and each is also its opposite-then the image of zero's perfect ring shines before us.