Bertrand Russell quote about truth from Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays - Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty
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Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty
 Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1910). copy citation

Context

“10] Such was Plato's judgment of mathematics; but the mathematicians do not read Plato, while those who read him know no mathematics, and regard his opinion upon this question as merely a curious aberration.
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.” source

Meaning and analysis

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