Some formulas are too complex and I don’t want anything to do with them.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.

Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren’t equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it’s just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

Power is a complicated word and can take many forms.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics – greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

Issues are never simple. One thing I’m proud of is that very rarely will you hear me simplify the issues.

It’s a very confusing era that we’re in.

When I was about thirteen, the library was going to get ‚Calculus for the Practical Man.‘ By this time I knew, from reading the encyclopedia, that calculus was an important and interesting subject, and I ought to learn it.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

We live in a bewildering world.

I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the king’s business.

I would say there are some foods that I strongly recommend that you do not eat. No. 1 on that list, I believe, is doughnuts. Comfort food. Zero value. Don’t eat them.

Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.

In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can’t you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that’s different from a California textbook that’s different from a Massachusetts textbook. That’s very expensive.

Everything in war is very simple. But the simplest thing is difficult.

The more I grow in popularity, the lonelier it gets. Because you don’t really know me. You just know this part of me. You fell in love with that. But it’s way more intricate than what meets the surface.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you’re opposed to it. But when you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.

War is so complex; human nature is so complex. There’s no filmmaker who has ever figured it out perfectly.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.

I think the depth, what children can handle and what they’re interested in, is much deeper than I think what people assume. I think it’s why sometimes we make things too simple for them.

That the divided but contiguous particles of bodies may be separated from one another is a matter of observation; and, in the particles that remain undivided, our minds are able to distinguish yet lesser parts, as is mathematically demonstrated.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

If a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve. I’m no better than anyone else at understanding what makes people tick, particularly women.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

In the past, there was active discrimination against women in science. That has now gone, and although there are residual effects, these are not enough to account for the small numbers of women, particularly in mathematics and physics.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

Making a film is like putting out a fire with sieve. There are so many elements, and it gets so complicated.

In the beginning of the year 1665, I found the method of approximating series and the rule for reducing any dignity of any binomial into such a series.

Nature hates calculators.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.

The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

Educators take something simple and make it complicated. Communicators take something complicated and make it simple.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.

Everybody’s got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

Infinites, when considered absolutely without any restriction or limitation, are neither equal nor unequal, nor have any certain proportion one to another, and therefore, the principle that all infinites are equal is a precarious one.