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"The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes."
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"I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account."

"To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be."

"I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about."

"I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh."

"Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions."

"Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's."

"Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness."

"We are servants rather than masters in mathematics."

"I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics."
Explore more quotes by E. T. Bell

"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."

"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."

"Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions."

"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."

"I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly."

"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."

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