A Quote by Evan Esar

[A mathematician is a] scientist who can figure out anything except such simple things as squaring the circle and trisecting an angle.

Evan Esar

Quote Topics

Angle Anything Circle Except Figure Mathematician Out Scientist Simple Simple Things Things

Quote Author

Evan Esar
American - Writer
1899 - 1995

... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal "the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates [for the ministry]." He said he didn't know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate's coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc.

Anna Julia Cooper

Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.

Eric Kandel

If I have learned anything as a scientist, it is that one should not make things complicated when a simple explanation will do.

Ivar Giaever

I could imagine actually being a scientist or a detective, but not a detective who puts his hands into gory, bloody things. But more like someone who figures things out. I like to figure things out.

Barbara Sukowa

If anything runs deeper than a mathematician’s love of variables, it’s a scientist’s love of constants.

Sam Kean

I take simple everyday things that happen to me and I figure it happens to a lot of other people and I make simple rhymes out of them.

Edgar Guest

Does it seem to you impossible to imagine anything more inextricable than the social contract, when you think of the frightful number of relations that it must regulate -- something like squaring the circle, or finding perpetual motion? That is the reason why, wearied of the struggle, you fall back on absolutism and force.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

I was born trying to figure out why other kids were just playing in a circle. What are you doing in the circle? Duck, Duck, Goose? What is the goose supposed to do? You could be organizing; you could be producing products that are for sale. You have a circle, but how are you utilizing it?

Stacey Abrams

The mathematician of to-day admits that he can neither square the circle, duplicate the cube or trisect the angle. May not our mechanicians, in like manner, be ultimately forced to admit that aerial flight is one of that great class of problems with which men can never cope... I do not claim that this is a necessary conclusion from any past experience. But I do think that success must await progress of a different kind from that of invention.

Simon Newcomb

The squaring of the circle is a stage on the way to the unconscious, a point of transition leading to a goal lying as yet unformulated beyond it. It is one of those paths to the centre.

Carl Jung

Most geometricians, chemists, mathematicians, and great scientists submit religion to reason only to discover a problem as unsolvable as that of squaring a circle.

Honore de Balzac

I'm not a scientist or a mathematician.

Margot Lee Shetterly

But the gambling reasoner is incorrigible: if he would but take to squaring the circle, what a load of misery would be saved.

Augustus De Morgan

It's very powerful if you can home in on, and really trust, intuition and its strength. Most men have shunned that in so many ways that they end up squaring off the circle of life.

Peter Buffett

I didn't think I was in a morbid mood, but it appears I am. My mind goes round and round trying to figure things out, but I always come back to the same two things: Loneliness and Death. Life ends before we figure anything out, most importantly how not to be lonely. Solitude is fine. But feeling like you have no one to love - abject lonliness - is not alright.