A Quote by Christopher Robin Milne

Mathematics is like music. Neither needs to be useful. It is enough that each gives delight to those who seek delight from it.

Christopher Robin Milne

Quote Topics

Delight Each Enough Gives Like Mathematics Music Needs Neither Seek Those Useful

Quote Author

Christopher Robin Milne
English - Businessman
August 21, 1920 - April 20, 1996

People who blame the Bible for the modern destruction of nature have failed to see its delight in the variety and individuality of creatures and its insistence upon their holiness. But that delight-in, say, the final chapters of Job or the 104th Psalm-is far more useful to the cause of conservation than the undifferentiating abstractions of science... Reverence gives standing to creatures, and to our perception of them, just as the law gives standing to a citizen.

Wendell Berry

... the word "theory" ... was originally an Orphic word, which Cornford interprets as "passionate sympathetic contemplation" ... For Pythagoras, the "passionate sympathetic contemplation" was intellectual, and issued in mathematical knowledge ... To those who have reluctantly learnt a little mathematics in school this may seem strange; but to those who have experienced the intoxicating delight of sudden understanding that mathematics gives, from time to time, to those who love it, the Pythagorean view will seem completely natural.

Bertrand Russell

My delight and thy delight Walking, like two angels white, In the gardens of the night.

Robert Bridges

Half the night I waste in sighs, Half in dreams I sorrow after The delight of early skies; In a wakeful dose I sorrow For the hand, the lips, the eyes, For the meeting of the morrow, The delight of happy laughter, The delight of low replies.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

One can see how great the delight of heaven must be from the fact that it is the delight of everyone in heaven to share his delights and blessings with others; and as such is the character of all that are in the heavens it is clear how immeasurable is the delight of heaven.

Emanuel Swedenborg

Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God. What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably.

Sri Aurobindo

Delight, Delight, Delight...in our youth.

Eddie Vedder

Like musicians who can read and write complicated scores in a world without sounds, for us mathematics is a source of delight, excitement, and even controversy which are hard to share with non mathematicians. In our small micro-cosmos we should ever seek the right balance between competition and solidarity, criticism and empathy, exclusion and inclusion.

Gil Kalai

If you clean the floor with love, you have done an invisible painting. Live each moment in such delight that it gives you something inner.

Rajneesh

Freedom of Will-that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order-who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them. In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful underwills or under-souls-indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls-to his feelings of delight as commander.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The clerisy are those who seek, and find, delight and enlargement of life in books. The clerisy are those for whom reading is a personal art.

Robertson Davies

Vitruvius, the great writer, architect and engineer, identified in his famous treatise on Architecture that the three values essential to any work of Architecture were: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas; or firmness, utility, and delight. Firmness meaning well built, solid and resistant; utility meaning useful and functional, and delight meaning beautiful.

Santiago Calatrava

She is sighing deeply now with sympathy and delight - the delight of an addict when someone else admits he's hooked, too.

Christopher Isherwood

In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of violence or tragedy or titillation or grossness or even sentimentality can move us, but how the written word elicits delight - what Nabokov calls that shiver in the spine - is much harder to calculate and define.

Alice McDermott

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the georgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Bertrand Russell

A man is a hypocrite only when he affects to take a delight in what he does not feel, not because he takes a perverse delight in opposite things.