Donato

“If you can look into the seeds of time And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak, then, to me, who neither beg nor fear Your favors nor your hate.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“Te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est." (Roughly, "They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.")”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as “white dielectric material,” or what is known more commonly as bird shit.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

“As was foreshadowed in Paragraphs 1 and 4, Cantor, and Dedekind's near-simultaneous appearance in math is more or less the Newton + Leibniz thing all over again, a sure sign that the Time Was Right for (Infinity)-type sets. Just as striking is the Escherian way the two men's work dovetails. Cantor is able to define and ground the concepts of 'infinite set' and 'transfinite number,' and to establish rigorous techniques for combining and comparing different types of (Infinity)s, which is just where Dedekind's def. of irrationals needs shoring up. Pro quo, the schnitt technique demonstrates that actually-infinite sets can have real utility in analysis. That, in other words, as sensuously and cognitively abstract as they must remain, (Infinity)s can nevertheless function in math as practical abstractions rather than as just weird paradoxical flights of fancy.”
― David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity