Quotations XVII: If People Don’t Believe That Mathematics Is Simple…

Quotes from my blackboard during October:

Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first, and the lesson afterward.

— Vernon Law

What, after all, is mathematics but the poetry of the mind, and what is poetry but the mathematics of the heart?

— David Eugene Smith

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.

— John von Neumann

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

— Steven Wright

Nothing produces such odd results as trying to get even.

— Franklin P. Jones