The forbidding symbols and equations are just another language: code for beautiful ideas that often find surprising uses in the ordinary world we all… - William Rowan Hamilton

Sometime, in the future that is knocking at our door, we shall have to retrain ourselves or our children to properly tell the truth. The exercise will be particularly painful in mathematics. The enrapturing discoveries of our field systematically conceal, like footprints erased in sand, the analogical train of thought that is the authentic life of mathematics. Shocking as it may be to the conservative logician, the day will come when currently vague concepts such as motivation and purpose will be made formal and accepted as constituents of a revamped logic, where they will at last be alloted the equal status they deserve, side-by-side with axioms and theorems. Until that day, however, the truths of mathematics will make only fleeting appearances, like shameful confessions whispered to a priest, to a psychiatrist, or to a wife.

Maurice Allais, La formation scientifique, Une communication du Prix Nobel d’économie, Maurice Allais, address to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (1997).

If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.