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Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not.

Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.

If education, culture, the higher life were shining things to be worshiped from afar, he had still a means left whereby he could draw one step nearer to them.

He was thinking alone, and seriously racking his brain to find a direction for this single force four times multiplied, with which he did not doubt, as with the lever for which Archimedes sought, they should succeed in moving the world, when some one tapped gently at his door.

Archimedes was my ideal. I admired the works of artists, but to my mind, they were only shadows and semblances. The inventor, I thought, gives to the world creations which are palpable, which live and work.

This searching and doubting and vacillating where nothing is clear but the arrogance of quest. I, too, had such noble ideas when I was still a boy.

The ancient Greeks have a knack of wrapping truths in myths.

He that knew all that learning ever writ, Knew only this - that he knew nothing yet.

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.

I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge - which is mathematical, essentially - can have a playful visual element to it.