“Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.”
As quoted in The Puzzle Instinct : The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life (2004) by Marcel Danesi, p. 71 from Human All-Too-Human
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Friedrich Nietzsche 655
German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and cl… 1844–1900Related quotes

Theorem I
Monas Hieroglyphica (1564)

“A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.”
Quoting a schoolchild in "English as She Is Taught"

"Logical and Mathematical Thought?" in The Monist, Vol. 20 (1909-1910), p. 69
Homage to the square' (1964), Oral history interview with Josef Albers' (1968)

“I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line.”
Molloy (1951)
Context: Having heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble … and if I did not go in a rigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something.

"Boscovich's mathematics", an article by J. F. Scott, in the book Roger Joseph Boscovich (1961) edited by Lancelot Law Whyte.
"Transient pressure analysis in composite reservoirs" (1982) by Raymond W. K. Tang and William E. Brigham.
"Non-Newtonian Calculus" (1972) by Michael Grossman and Robert Katz.

Source: Thorns (1967), Chapter 21, “And Southward Aye We Fled” (p. 106)

Preface, Tr. Bax (1883) citing Isaac Newton's Principia
(1786)

In the meantime, this little is something which mathematics indispensably requires in its application to natural science, which, inasmuch as it must here necessarily borrow from metaphysics, need not be ashamed to allow itself to be seen in company with the latter.
Preface, Tr. Bax (1883) citing Isaac Newton's Principia
Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786)