QED

[T]here is still room for beauty, suitably defined, but we have to learn to live with the division of labor. We, humans, would do the simple part, and computers will do the complex part. And by “complex”, I do not mean just tedious number crunching. Ninety-nine percent of what mathematicians do today is just one [...]

Perhaps another thing to say about mathematics in this respect is that it’s a bit like discovering oil. [...] mathematics has one great advantage over oil, in that no one has yet—and physicists will show you they never will—found a way that you can keep on using the same oil forever. However, mathematics is never [...]

By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.
Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (1911)

May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason? The musician feels mathematics, the mathematician thinks music: music the dream, mathematics the working life.
James Joseph Sylvester

The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one’s blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one’s best moments that count [...]

In mathematics, as in any scientific research, we find two tendencies present. On the one hand, the tendency toward abstraction seeks to crystallize the logical relations inherent in the maze of material that is being studied, and to correlate the material in a systematic and orderly manner. On the other hand, the tendency toward intuitive [...]

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. “Immortality” may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
Godfrey Harold Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (1940)

Very often in mathematics the crucial problem is to recognize and discover what are the relevant concepts; once this is accomplished the job may be more than half done.
Israel Nathan Herstein

… mathematics is very much like poetry … what makes a good poem — a great poem — is that there is a large amount of thought expressed in very few words. In this sense formulas like or are poems.
Lipman Bers

230(231-1) is the greatest perfect number that will ever be discovered, for, as they are merely curious without being useful, it is not likely that any person will attempt to find a number beyond it.
Peter Barlow, Elementary Investigation of the Theory of Numbers (1811)
Deze uitspraak is maar al te verkeerd gebleken: perfecte getallen hangen samen [...]