16th-century Mathematician Quotes

Galileo Galilei

Gerardus Mercator

Gerolamo Cardano

John Napier

Marin Mersenne

François Viète

Robert Fludd

Good things should be cast in bronze and bad ones cast to the winds.

Galileo Galilei

Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.

The Rule of Three, or Golden Rule of Arithmetical whole Numbers. Be the three terms given 2 3 4....To finde their fourth proporcional Term: that is to say, in such Reason to the third term 4, as the second term 3, is to the first term.... Multiply the second term 3, by the third term 4, & giveth the product 12: which dividing by the first term 2, giveth the Quotient 6: I say that 6 is the fourth proportional term required.

We can land men on the moon, but, for all our mechanical and electronic wizardry, we cannot reproduce an artificial fore-finger that can feel as well as beckon.

I swear to you by the Sacred Gospel, and on my faith as a gentleman, not only never to publish your discoveries, if you tell them to me, but I also promise and pledge my faith as a true Christian to put them down in cipher so that after my death no one shall be able to understand them.

Gerolamo Cardano

Particulars are frequently fallible, but universals never. Occult philosophy lays bare Nature in her complete nakedness, and alone contemplates the wisdom of universals by the eyes of intelligence. Accustomed to partake of the rivers which flow from the Fountain of Life, it is unacquainted with grossness and with clouded waters.

And how admirable and rare an ornament, O good God, is mildenesse in a divine? And how much is it to be wished in this age, that all divines were mathematicians? that is men gentle and meeke.

Bartholomaeus Pitiscus

There is a certain way of searching for the truth in mathematics that Plato is said first to have discovered; Theon named it analysis, and defined it as the assumption of that which is sought as if it were admitted and working through its consequences to what is admitted to be true. This is opposed to synthesis, which is the assuming what is admitted and working through its consequences to arrive at and to understand that which is sought.

François Viète

When I saw that Moses' version of the Genesis of the world did not fit sufficiently in many ways with Aristotle and the rest of the philosophers, I began to have doubts about the truth of all philosophers and started to investigate the secrets of nature.

Gerardus Mercator

For that my opinion doth differ from some of the ancient writers in natural Phylosophy, it is possible that it may be ytterly dislyked of and condemned to be of no trueth.

William Bourne (mathematician)

If reasons reache transcende the skye, Why shoulde it then to earthe be bounde? The witte is wronged and leadde awrye, If mynde be maried to the grounde.

We can take pride in the fact that there is no science as certain as ours [alchemy] because it teaches by experience which is the mother, the source and the universal cause of all knowledge: and it is for the lack of this that Aristotle and the other philosophers have wondrously failed in their philosophy.