Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth; some of its rivals do. That science is in some respects inhuman may be the secret of … - Eric Temple Bell

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.

[L]ogarithms are one of the most disorderly battlegrounds in mathematical history. ...Disputes like this and the other over the calculus have made more than one man of science envy his successors of ten thousand years hence, to whom Newton and Leibniz, Napier and Bürgi, and scores of lesser contestants for individual fame will be semimythical figures as indistinct as Pythagoras.

The cowboys have a way of trussing up a steer or a pugnacious bronco which fixes the brute so that it can neither move nor think. This is the hog-tie, and it is what Euclid did to geometry.