Motivational quotes are a great way to get excited, get moving, and share your passion. We love math, so our collection focuses on powerful math quotes.
There are so many amazing math mathematicians out there with nuggets of wisdom we can all learn from. Enjoy this curated collection of math quotes, which is updated regularly.
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook for more fun with math. Please feel free to share these quotes on your social channels, and check back often for more!
“I loved logic, math, computer programming. I loved systems and logic approaches. And so I just figured architecture is this perfect combination.” - Maya Lin
“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.” - William James
“Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” - Blaise Pascal
"The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers." - Maryam Mirzakhani
"You want to know how to rhyme, then learn how to add. It's mathematics." - Mos Def
“Geometry existed before creation.” - Plato
"Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection." - Richard Courant
“Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum.” - Leonhard Euler
"It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer." - Albert Einstein
"It's fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way - even if you don't solve it at the end of the day." - Andrew Wiles
“Mathematics is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency.” - René Descartes
“To ask the right question is harder than to answer it.” - Georg Cantor
“Mathematics, in general, is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.” - Felix Klein
“Logic is the anatomy of thought.” - John Locke
"The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself." - Andrew Wiles
"But in my opinion, all things in nature occur mathematically." - Rene Descartes
"Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense." - William Thomson
"Mathematics has beauty and romance. It’s not a boring place to be, the mathematical world. It’s an extraordinary place; it’s worth spending time there." - Marcus du Sautoy
"Pure mathematics is the world’s best game. It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly. It’s free. It can be played anywhere — Archimedes did it in a bathtub." - Richard J. Trudeau
“If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.” - Galileo Galilei
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." - Archimedes
"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers." - Richard Hamming
"Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth.” - Marston Morse
“Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.” - Frank Capra
“Mathematics is a language.” - Josiah Willard Gibbs
“It is clear that the chief end of mathematical study must be to make the students think.” – John Wesley Young
“Mathematics is the science which uses easy words for hard ideas.” – Edward Kasner
“You can be creative in anything — in math, science, engineering, philosophy — as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance.” – Ken Robinson
“Math is like going to the gym for your brain. It sharpens your mind.” - Danica McKellar
“Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton asked why.” – Bernard Baruch
“It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.” - Eric Temple Bell
“Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.” - Stendhal
"Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms." - Carl Benjamin Boyer
"Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things." - Isaac Newton
“Mathematics is on the artistic side, a creation of new rhythms, orders, designs, harmonies, and on the knowledge side, is a systematic study of various rhythms, orders.” - William L. Schaaf
"I can only play the sport for so long, I have mathematics for the rest of my life." - John Urschel
"Scientists too seldom stress the enormity of our ignorance." - Vera Rubin
"You have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty in math." - Maryam Mirzakhani
“To me, mathematics, computer science, and the arts are insanely related. They’re all creative expressions.” – Sebastian Thrun
“One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.” -Philip J. Davis
“The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened.” – Richard Dawkins
“No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.” – Leonardo Da Vinci
“The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.” - Charles Caleb Colton
"Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have." - Charles Darwin
"The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics." - Paul Halmos
“Mathematics is the gate and key to science.” - Roger Bacon
“Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.” - Danica McKellar
“There will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.” – Katherine Johnson
“You don’t have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers.” - John Forbes Nash, Jr.
“Mathematics is the most beautiful and most powerful creation of the human spirit.” - Stefan Banach
“Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.” - Deepak Chopra
“Number rules the universe.” - Pythagoras
“I’ve always enjoyed mathematics. It is the most precise and concise way of expressing an idea.” - N.R. Narayana Murthy
“In mathematics, the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.” - Georg Cantor
“If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.” - John von Neumann
"Just because we can’t find a solution, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one." - Andrew Wiles
"Mathematics compares the most diverse phenomena and discovers the secret analogies that unite them.”
- Joseph Fourier
"Life is a math equation. In order to gain the most, you have to know how to convert negatives into positives." - Anonymous
"Mathematics may not teach us to add love or subtract hate, but it gives us hope that every problem has a solution." - Anonymous
"A mathematician who is not also something of a poet will never be a complete mathematician." - Karl Weierstrass
"Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems — they love a challenge." - Andrew Wiles
“The essence of math is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.” - Stan Gudder
"Wherever there is number, there is beauty." - Proclus
“Why do children dread mathematics? Because of the wrong approach. Because it is looked at as a subject.” - Shakuntala Devi
"To not know math is a severe limitation to understanding the world." - Richard P. Feynman
"What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature." - Shakuntala Devi
“I’ve always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better.” - Alvin E. Roth
"The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom." - Georg Cantor
“Nature is written in mathematical language.” - Galileo Galilei
“‘Obvious’ is the most dangerous word in mathematics.” - Eric Temple Bell
“Mathematics is not about numbers, equations, computations, or algorithms: it is about understanding.” - William Paul Thurston
“Mathematics is the music of reason.” - James Joseph Sylvester
“There should be no such thing as boring mathematics.” - Edsger Dijkstra
“It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.” - Sofia Kovalevskaya
“Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.” - Dean Schlicter
"Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics." - Simeon Poisson
“All systems operate optimally. You just have to figure out what they are optimizing over.” - Henry Pollak
"Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can’t do in the real world." - Marcus du Sautoy