This thread is to offer the opportunity to share clever quotations that people have come across.

 

To kick off here is one from Professor Inglis

 

 

Having to evaluate an expression of the form 0/0 is the penalty you have to pay for over-idealization and is an indication that the treatment of the problem is at variance with Nature.

 

"Matter tells space-time how to curve, and space time tells matter how to move."

--John Archibald Wheeler

All models are wrong, but some are useful

— George E.P. Box

Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

 

-- John von Neumann

 

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

“To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. He can perhaps say what the experiment died of.”

 

-- R.A. Fisher

 

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.

Orville Wright

 

No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris.

Orville Wright