Augustus De Morgan Quotes

#1. I did not hear what you said, but I absolutely disagree with you.

Augustus De Morgan

#2. It was long before I got at the maxim, that in reading an old mathematician you will not read his riddle unless you plough with his heifer; you must see with his light, if you want to know how much he saw.

Augustus De Morgan

#3. I was x years old in the year x2.

Augustus De Morgan

#4. The first experiment already illustrates a truth of the theory, well confirmed by practice, what-ever can happen will happen if we make trials enough.

Augustus De Morgan

#5. Wrong hypotheses, rightly worked from, have produced more useful results than unguided observations.

Augustus De Morgan

#6. The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination.

Augustus De Morgan

#7. I am perfectly convinced that I have both seen, and heard in a manner which should make unbelief impossible, things called spiritual which cannot be taken by a rational being to be capable of explanation by imposture, coincidence, or mistake.

Augustus De Morgan

#8. Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum, And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on, While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

Augustus De Morgan

#9. All existing things upon this earth, which have knowledge of their own existence, possess, some in one degree and some in another, the power of thought, accompanied by perception, which is the awakening of thought by the effects of external objects upon the senses.

Augustus De Morgan

#10. Every science that has thriven has thriven upon its own symbols: logic, the only science which is admitted to have made no improvements in century after century, is the only one which has grown no symbols.

Augustus De Morgan

#11. The gambling reasoner is incorrigible; if he would but take to the squaring of the circle, what a load of misery would be saved.

Augustus De Morgan

#12. Common integration is only the memory of differentiation ...

Augustus De Morgan

#13. It is easier to square a circle than to get round a mathematician.

Augustus De Morgan

#14. Imagine a person with a gift of ridicule [He might say] First that a negative quantity has no logarithm; secondly that a negative quantity has no square root; thirdly that the first non-existent is to the second as the circumference of a circle is to the diameter.

Augustus De Morgan

#15. My opinion of mankind is founded upon the mournful fact that, so far as I can see, they find within themselves the means of believing in a thousand times as much as there is to believe in.

Augustus De Morgan

#16. I don't quite hear what you say, but I beg to differ entirely with you.

Augustus De Morgan

#17. Mathematicians care no more for logic than logicians for mathematics.

Augustus De Morgan

#18. As to writing another book on geometry [to replace Euclid] the middle ages would have as soon thought of composing another New Testament.

Augustus De Morgan

#19. The Astronomer's Drinking Song
Astronomers! What can avail
Those who calumniate us;
Experiment can never fail
With such an apparatus ...

Augustus De Morgan

#20. The sacred writings excepted, no Greek has been so much read and so variously translated as Euclid.

Augustus De Morgan