Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour s… - William Rowan Hamilton

Those who thought they could distinguish philosophy from mathematics by saying that the former was concerned with quality only, the latter with quantity only, mistook effect for cause. It is owing to the form of mathematical knowledge that it can refer to quanta only, because it is only the concept of quantities that admits of construction, that is, of a priori representation in intuition, while qualities cannot be represented in any but empirical intuition.

I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics anyway.

Like the crests on the heads of peacocks, like the gems on the hoods of the cobras, mathematics is at the top of the Vedanga sastras.