Hermann Weyl

The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most powerful expressions of that sovereignty of the intellect that inspired the thought of those times. At a later epoch, when the intellectual despotism of the Church, which had been maintained through the Middle Ages, had crumbled, and a wave of scepticism threatened to sweep away all that had seemed most fixed, those who believed in Truth clung to Geometry as to a rock, and it was the highest ideal of every scientist to carry on his science 'more geometrico.

With mathematics we stand precisely at that intersection of bondage and freedom that is the essence of the human itself.

My work has always tried to unite the True with the Beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the Beautiful.

Mathematics has the inhuman quality of starlight, brilliant and sharp, but cold.