Quotes from Eric Temple Bell

The hippopotamus is said to have a tender heart by those who have eaten that delicacy baked, so a thick skin is not necessarily a reliable index to what is inside the man.

This queer crotchet [of Hamilton's] that algebra is the science of pure time has attracted many philosophers, and quite recently it has been exhumed and solemnly dissected by owlish metaphysicians seeking the philosopher's stone in the gall bladder of mathematics.

In all that galaxy of talent there was no brighter star than Niels Henrik Abel, the man of whom Hermite said, "He has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years.

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

Clarity is, indeed, all the more necessary when one essays to lead the reader farther from the beaten path and into wilder territory- Joseph Liouville

Projective geometry has opened up for us with the greatest facility new territories in our science, and has rightly been called a royal road to its own particular field of knowledge. —FELIX KLEIN

Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust on him should try to get on without it for a week.

Lagrange's father, once Treasurer of War for Sardinia, married Marie-Thérèse Gros, the only daughter of a wealthy physician of Cambiano, by whom he had eleven children. Of this numerous brood only the youngest, Joseph-Louis, born on January 25, 1736, survived beyond infancy.

The very basis of creative work is irreverence! The very basis of creative work is bold experimentation. There has never been a creator of lasting importance who has not also been an innovator.

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future...