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All E. T. Bell Quotes
The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.
E. T. Bell
57% of people like this quote
Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about.
E. T. Bell
53% of people like this quote
I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.
E. T. Bell
53% of people like this quote
Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.
E. T. Bell
52% of people like this quote
Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.
E. T. Bell
52% of people like this quote
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.
E. T. Bell
51% of people like this quote
It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.
E. T. Bell
50% of people like this quote
The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.
E. T. Bell
48% of people like this quote
Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth.
E. T. Bell
45% of people like this quote
The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.
E. T. Bell
26% of people like this quote
Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.
E. T. Bell
25% of people like this quote
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