“Profound study of nature is the most fertile source of mathematical discoveries.”

“Natural history studies are fun, rewarding and an invaluable source of information.”

“Laplace created a number of new mathematical methods that were subsequently expanded into branches of mathematics, but he never cared for mathematics except as it helped him to study nature.”

“Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.”

“I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

“In this branch of study exactness is an essential feature; and mathematical difficulties must not be shrunk from when the nature of the subject leads to them.”

“Instead of wanting everyone to share and know of their discoveries the Pythagoreans suppressed the square root of two and the dodecahedron. The outside world was not to know. The Pythagoreans had discovered, in the mathematical underpinnings of nature, one of the two most powerful scientific tools, the other of course is experiment, but instead of using their insight to advance the collective voyage of human discovery they made of it little more than the hocus-pocus of a mystery cult. Science and mathematics were to be removed from the hands of the merchants and the artisans.”

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”

“When we study history we obtain a more profound insight into human nature by instituting a comparison between the present and former states of society.”

“Envisaging the whole range of foreign commerce… the image of it as a prize which governments can, and ought to win for their traders at the expense of the traders supported by other governments, has been a most fertile source of international misunderstanding.”