1.

A mathematician is like that prince serching for the Ox-headed Minotar in his Cretean maze with the thread in his hand symbolising Mathematics.

Roger Bacon (1214-1294)

In mathematics I can report no deficience, except it be that men do not sufficiently understand the excellent use of the Pure Mathematics. Mathematics is the door and key to the sciences. Neglect of mathematics works injury to all knowledge, since he who is ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of the world. There are four great sciences ... Of these sciences the gate and key is mathematics, which the saints discovered at the beginning of the world. ... mathematics is absolutely necessary and useful to the other sciences.

Geoge Cantor (1845-1918)

The essence of mathematics is its freedom.

2. God does arithmetic.- Carl Friedrich Gauss

Hermann Hankel (1839-1873)

purely intellectual, a pure theory of forms, which has as its purpose, not the combination of quantities, or of their images, the numbers, but objects of thought to which may correspond effectives or relations, even though such a correspondence is not necessary. In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built, and what one has established, another undoes. In Mathematics alone each generation adds a new storey to the old structure. Paul Erds
A Mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. Why are numbers beautiful? It's like asking why is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don't see why, someone can't tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren't beautiful, nothing is.

Isaac Newton
If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants. Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things. If Pythagoras ever existed, he may have said this Number rules the universe. Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons

3. It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.- Sofia Kovalevskaya 4. "Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics." - Dean Schlicter 5. "Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game." - G. H. Hardy

6. "The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree." Aristotle 7. "How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought independent of experience, is so admirably adapted to the objects of reality?" - Albert Einstein 8. "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." - Max Wilhelm Dehn 9. "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture." - Bertrand Russell