Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes About Mathematics

• Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Funny, Humorous, Math

• Mathematics has the completely false reputation of yielding infallible conclusions. Its infallibility is nothing but identity. Two times two is not four, but it is just two times two, and that is what we call four for short. But four is nothing new at all. And thus it goes on and on in its conclusions, except that in the higher formulas the identity fades out of sight.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Math, Two, Sight

• The works of Lavoisier and his associates operated upon many of us at that time like the Sun's rising after a night of moonshine: but Chemistry is now betrothed to the Mathematics, and is in consequence grown somewhat shy of her former admirers.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Hard Work, Science, Night

  Luke Howard, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1976). “Luke Howard (1772-1864): His Correspondence with Goethe and His Continental Journey of 1816”

• Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Party, Prejudice, Null

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Stuart Blackie (1883). “The Wisdom of Goethe”, Edinburgh, W. Blackwood

• It has been said that figures rule the world. Maybe. But I am sure that figures show us whether it is being ruled well or badly.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Math, World, Statistics

• I have heard myself accused of being an opponent, an enemy of mathematics, which no one can value more highly than I, for it accomplishes the very thing whose achievement has been denied me.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Achievement, Enemy, Opponents

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