Memorabilia Mathematica; or, the Philomath's Quotation-Book
Science
Memorabilia Mathematica; or, the Philomath's Quotation-Book
Mathematics; Mathematics -- Quotations, maxims, etc.
More frequently from the same source I drew
A pleasure quiet and profound, a sense
Of permanent and universal sway,
And paramount belief; there, recognized
A type, for finite natures, of the one
Supreme Existence, the surpassing life
Which to the boundaries of space and time,
Of melancholy space and doleful time,
Superior and incapable of change,
Nor touched by welterings of passion--is,
And hath the name of God. Transcendent peace
And silence did wait upon these thoughts
That were a frequent comfort to my youth.
* * * * *
Mighty is the charm
Of those abstractions to a mind beset
With images and haunted by himself,
And specially delightful unto me
Was that clear synthesis built up aloft
So gracefully; even then when it appeared
Not more than a mere plaything, or a toy
To sense embodied: not the thing it is
In verity, an independent world,
Created out of pure intelligence.
--WORDSWORTH.
_The Prelude, Bk. 6._
=1849.=
’Tis told by one whom stormy waters threw,
With fellow-sufferers by the shipwreck spared,
Upon a desert coast, that having brought
To land a single volume, saved by chance,
A treatise of Geometry, he wont,
Although of food and clothing destitute,
And beyond common wretchedness depressed,
To part from company, and take this book
(Then first a self taught pupil in its truths)
To spots remote, and draw his diagrams
With a long staff upon the sand, and thus
Did oft beguile his sorrow, and almost
Forget his feeling:
--WORDSWORTH.
_The Prelude, Bk. 6._
=1850.= We study art because we receive pleasure from the great
works of the masters, and probably we appreciate them the more
because we have dabbled a little in pigments or in clay. We do
not expect to be composers, or poets, or sculptors, but we wish
to appreciate music and letters and the fine arts, and to derive
pleasure from them and be uplifted by them....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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