"I will share all of this with you whenever you wish"
About this Quote
A promise that sounds tender until you remember who’s speaking: Pierre de Fermat, the famously elusive mathematician-lawyer whose most notorious “sharing” involved withholding the crucial steps. Read against Fermat’s legend, “I will share all of this with you whenever you wish” isn’t just generosity; it’s control disguised as courtesy. The power sits in the timing clause. “Whenever you wish” pretends to hand agency to the listener, but it quietly positions Fermat as the gatekeeper of “all of this,” the owner of a complete apparatus that others can access only by invitation.
That rhetorical move fits a 17th-century world where knowledge traveled by letters, salons, and patronage rather than open journals and preprints. Sharing wasn’t a default; it was a social transaction. Fermat, a provincial magistrate with elite mathematical hobbies, didn’t need institutional validation. He could afford to be coy, to drop results like challenges, to treat proofs as private property. The line carries the polite sheen of a cultured correspondent, but its subtext is: I have the whole thing; you have your curiosity. Ask nicely.
As a lawyer, he’d also be steeped in the choreography of disclosure: what you reveal, when, and to whom, matters as much as the content. The phrase reads like a deposition postponed, or a brief offered at the client’s convenience - strategically calm, impeccably civil, and faintly unanswerable. It’s intimacy with an escape hatch, and it’s exactly how a mind like Fermat’s maintains mystique while appearing magnanimous.
That rhetorical move fits a 17th-century world where knowledge traveled by letters, salons, and patronage rather than open journals and preprints. Sharing wasn’t a default; it was a social transaction. Fermat, a provincial magistrate with elite mathematical hobbies, didn’t need institutional validation. He could afford to be coy, to drop results like challenges, to treat proofs as private property. The line carries the polite sheen of a cultured correspondent, but its subtext is: I have the whole thing; you have your curiosity. Ask nicely.
As a lawyer, he’d also be steeped in the choreography of disclosure: what you reveal, when, and to whom, matters as much as the content. The phrase reads like a deposition postponed, or a brief offered at the client’s convenience - strategically calm, impeccably civil, and faintly unanswerable. It’s intimacy with an escape hatch, and it’s exactly how a mind like Fermat’s maintains mystique while appearing magnanimous.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
|---|
More Quotes by Pierre
Add to List
