Heisuke Hironaka, as quoted by Allyn Jackson: (quote from p. 1019) — Infinity

"The Pythagoreans associated good and evil with the limited and unlimited, respectively."

"And in that moment, I swear we were infinite."

"We cannot say that the infinite has no effect, and the only effectiveness which we can ascribe to it is that of a principle. Everything is either a source or derived from a source. But there cannot be a source of the infinite or limitless, for that would be a limit of it. Further, as it is a beginning, it is both uncreatable and indestructible. For there must be a point at which what has come to be reaches completion, and also a termination of all passing away. That is why, as we say, there is no principle of this, but it is this which is held to be the principle of other things, and to encompass all and to steer all, as those assert who do not recognize, alongside the infinite, other causes, such as Mind or Friendship. Further they identify it with the Divine, for it is deathless and imperishable as Anaximander says, with the majority of the physicists."

"Dans chaque point réel, qui fait une Monade... il y pourroit lire encor tout le passé, et même tout lavenir infiniment infini, puisque chaque moment contient une infinité de choses , et quil y a une infinité de momens dans chaque partie du temps, et une infinité dheures, dannées, de siecles, deônes, dans toute léternité future. Quelle infinité dinfinités infiniment répliquée, quel monde, quel univers dans quelque corpuscule quon pourroit assigner."

"If I should ask... how many squares there are one might reply truly that there are as many as the corresponding number of roots, since every square has its own root and every root its own square, while no square has more than one root and no root more than one square. ... But if I inquire how many roots there are, it cannot be denied that there are as many as there are numbers because every number is a root of some square. This being granted we must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers because they are just as numerous as their roots, and all the numbers are roots. Yet at the outset we said there are many more numbers than squares, since the larger portion of them are not squares. Not only so, but the proportionate number of squares diminishes as we pass to larger numbers. ... So far as I see we can only infer that the totality of all numbers is infinite, that the number of squares is infinite, and that the number of their roots is infinite; neither is the number of squares less than the totality of all numbers, nor the latter greater than the former, and finally the attributes "equal," "greater," and "less," are not applicable to infinite, but only to finite quantities. When therefore Simplicio introduces several lines of different lengths and asks me how it is possible that the longer ones do not contain more points than the shorter, I answer him that one line does not contain more or less or just as many points as another, but that each line contains an infinite number. Or if I had replied to him that the points in one line were equal in number to the squares; in another, greater than the totality of numbers; and in the little one, as many as the number of cubes, might I not, indeed, have satisfied him by thus placing more points in one line than in another and yet maintaining an infinite number in each. So much for the first difficulty."

"All this arguing of infinities is but the ambition of school boys."