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Ah there is one thing about them more wonderful than their numbers ... in all that vast number there is not one man called Gisgo.
--
Spoken as a jest to one of his officers named Gisgo, who had remarked on the numbers of Roman forces against them before the Battle of Cannae (2 August 216 BC), as quoted in A History of Rome (1855), by Henry George Liddell Vol. 1, p. 355
--
Variant translation: You forget one thing Gisgo, among all their numerous forces, there is not one man called Gisgo.

 

Hannibal

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Vast Numbers throng'd the fruitful Hive;
Yet those vast Numbers made 'em thrive;
Millions endeavouring to supply
Each other's Lust and Vanity.

 

Bernard Mandeville

 

Orthodox Judaism has this amazing set of rules: everyday there's a bunch of strictures of things you're supposed to do, a bunch you're not supposed to do, and the number you're supposed to do is the same number as the number of bones in the body. The number that you're not supposed to do is the same number as the number of days in the year. The amazing thing is, nobody knows what the rules are! Talmudic rabbis have been scratching each others' eyes out for centuries arguing over which rules go into the 613. The numbers are more important than the content. It is sheer numerology.

 

Robert Sapolsky

 

The integers, the rationals, and the irrationals, taken together, make up the continuum of real numbers. It's called a continuum because the numbers are packed together along the real number line with no empty spaces between them.

 

Brian Hayes

 

If there is some determinate succession of defined whole real numbers, among which there exists no greatest, on the basis of this second principle of generation a new number is obtained which is regarded as the limit of those numbers, i.e. is defined as the next greater number than all of them.

 

Georg Cantor

 

That from the outset they expect or even impose all the properties of finite numbers upon the numbers in question, while on the other hand the infinite numbers, if they are to be considered in any form at all, must (in their contrast to the finite numbers) constitute an entirely new kind of number, whose nature is entirely dependent upon the nature of things and is an object of research, but not of our arbitrariness or prejudices.

 

Georg Cantor