“The great mathematician fully, almost ruthlessly, exploits the domain of permissible reasoning and skirts the impermissible. That his recklessness does not lead him into a morass of contradictions is a miracle in itself: certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin’s process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess” - Wigner, On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

“All these difficulties are but consequences of our refusal to see that mathematics cannot be defined without acknowledging its most obvious feature: namely, that it is interesting" - Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

“Mathematics does play, however, also a more sovereign role in physics” - Wigner, On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

“A possible explanation of the physicist’s use of mathematics to formulate his laws of nature is that he is a somewhat irresponsible person” - Wigner, On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

“The full meaning of life, the collective meaning of all human desires, is fundamentally a mystery beyond our grasp. As a young man, I chafed at this state of affairs. But by now I have made peace with it. I even feel a certain honor to be associated with such a mystery." - Wigner, (I’m not sure, but maybe?)