Infinity is a floorless room without walls or ceiling. – Author Unknown

Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. – Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World

The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede. – Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Let us grant that the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings. – Alfred North Whitehead