Quotes from Hermann Weyl

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

Besides language and music, mathematics is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind.

God exists because arithmetic is consistent - the Devil exists because we can't prove it!

Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty and perfection.

My work has always tried to unite the True with the Beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the Beautiful.

But it seems an irony of creation that man's mind knows how to handle things the better the farther removed they are from the center of his existence. Thus we are cleverest where knowledge matters least....

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

Besides language and music mathematics is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind.

The objective world is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling along the lifeline of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.

Our generation is witness to a development of physical knowledge such as has not been seen since the days of Kepler, Galileo and Newton, and mathematics has scarcely ever experienced such a stormy epoch. Mathematical thought removes the spirit from its worldly haunts to solitude and renounces the unveiling of the secrets of Nature. But as recompense, mathematics is less bound to the course of worldly events than physics.

Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight, brilliant and sharp, but cold.

My work has always tried to unite the True with the Beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the Beautiful.

By refraining from reducing multiplication to addition we are enabled through these axioms to banish continuity, which is so difficult to fix precisely, from the logical structure of geometry.

If Hilbert's view prevails over intuitionism, as appears to be the case, then I see in this a decisive defeat of the philosophical attitude of pure phenomenology, which thus proves to be insufficient for the understanding of creative science even in the area of cognition that is most primal and most readily open to evidence – mathematics.

With mathematics we stand precisely at that intersection of bondage and freedom that is the essence of the human itself.

Or, we may use Cartesian co-ordinate systems from the outset:

It is a tragic and strange fact , a superb malice of the creator , that man's mind is so immensely better suited for handling what is irrelevant than what is relevant to him.

Two possibilities present themselves for the analytical treatment of metrical geometry.

the problem is then to develop a theory of invariance with respect to arbitrary linear transformations, in which, however, in contra-distinction to the case of affine geometry, we have a definite invariant quadratic form, viz. the metrical groundform once and for all as an absolute datum.

We must here follow the first course so as to be able to pass on later to generalisations which extend beyond the limits of Euclidean geometry.

when placed in two positions successively, realises this idea of the equality of two portions of space ; by a rigid body we mean one which, however it be moved or treated, can always be made to appear the same to us as before, if we take up the appropriate position with respect to it. I shall