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“Someone responding to intuition, to chance and fortune, often can't explain himself well.”
― Alec Wilkinson, The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration

“I don’t think there is any mystery to understanding the passionate feelings people have for guns. Nobody really believes it’s about maintaining a militia. It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation.”
― Alec Wilkinson

“One of the reasons there are so many terms for conditions of ice is that the mariners observing it were often trapped in it, and had nothing to do except look at it.”
― Alec Wilkinson, The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andrée and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration

“Somewhere Chesterton writes--I think it is Chesterton--that you cannot reason a man from a position that reason didn’t deliver him to.”
― Alec Wilkinson

“John Wayne Gacy is obsessively fond of defending his innocence, which is imaginary. On March 12, 1980, he was convicted in Chicago of killing thirty-three boys. The murders took place between 1972 and 1978, when he was caught and arrested. No one else in America has ever been convicted of killing so many people. Twenty-seven of the bodies were buried in a crawl space beneath the house where Gacy lived,”
― Alec Wilkinson, Conversations With a Killer

“I read once of David Hockney’s answering the question, Why do your shoeless figures always have socks on, by saying, I can’t draw feet.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“The belief that mathematics exists somewhere else than within us, that it is discovered more than created, is called Platonism, after Plato’s belief in a non-spatiotemporal realm that was the region of the perfect forms of which the objects on earth were imperfect reproductions. By definition, the non-spatiotemporal realm is outside time and space. It is not the creation of any deity, it simply is. To say that it is eternal or that it has always existed is to make a temporal remark, which does not apply. It is the timeless nowhere which never has and never will exist anywhere but which nevertheless is. The physical world is temporal and declines, the non-spatiotemporal one is ideal and doesn’t.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“No idea is bad unless a person is uncritical. Accepting a guess as a truth, as superstitious people do, is misguided, but so is ignoring a guess, as pedantic people do. As regards ideas, it is only bad not to have any.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“I am by nature a self-improver. I have read Gibbon, I have read Proust. I read the Old and New Testaments and most of Shakespeare. I studied French. I have meditated. I jogged. I learned to draw, using the right side of my brain.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“In Ulysses James Joyce writes that the present is the drain that the future goes down on its way to becoming the past.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“Like numbers, human experience has abstract and practical sides, feeling and reason, and in each of us one or the other tends to dominate. Belief does not persuade a scientist, and science does not persuade a believer. Too ardent an embrace of reason leads to irrational thinking, and too ardent an embrace of feeling leads to madness. William James says that religious mysticism is only half of the possible mysticisms, the others are forms of insanity. These are the states in which mystical convictions circle back on a person and pessimistically invert notions of divinity into notions of evil.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“Mathematics is objective and permanent. A² + B² = C² was true before Pythagoras had his name attached to it, and will be true when the sun goes out and no one is left to think of it. It is true for any alien life that might think of it, and true whether they think of it or not. It cannot be changed.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“A science involving things you can’t see whose presence is confined to the imagination.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“Descartes arrives at four precepts that “would prove perfectly sufficient for me, provided I took the firm and unwavering resolution never in a single instance to fail in observing them.â€� They amount to a kind of diagram for how to think. He writes: The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such â€� to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt. The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution. The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence. And the last, in every case to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“We don’t know where numbers come from or why they have the properties they do, unless you believe that they are a system invented by humans based on the ways in which we apprehend the world, a creation of our thinking and therefore our neurology.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“Darwin said, “A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age

“Human beings have shone a light on numbers, and we’ve picked out a logical system,â€� she said. “You can’t bring God into this. It’s unnecessary.â€� After that I shut up around her about Plato. She also said, “I have to admit I was kind of alarmed when I realized how bad your arithmetic skills were.â€� “How did you know that?â€� “From the things you would ask.”
― Alec Wilkinson, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age