Wit & Attitude Quote by E. T. Bell

A mathematician talking like a tragedian is doing something sly: he’s dragging the clean certainty of numbers into the messy, humiliating timeline of human life. “Time makes fools of us all” lands with the bluntness of a theorem, but it isn’t about punctuality or aging gracefully. It’s about the inevitability that even our best ideas get outgrown. In mathematics especially, yesterday’s breakthrough becomes today’s exercise set, and the person who proved it gets flattened into a name attached to a lemma, if they’re lucky.

Bell’s subtext is an ego-check aimed at the scholarly instinct to treat knowledge as a monument. Time doesn’t merely erase reputations; it reveals how provisional our confidence is. What feels like mastery is often just a temporary alignment between our tools and our ignorance. The “fool” isn’t the ignorant person; it’s the expert who forgets the shelf life of expertise.

Then comes the pivot: “Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.” That line is not simple optimism. It’s a kind of austere consolation prize, the academic version of immortality: your work matters because it becomes scaffolding for someone else’s tower. It also carries a quiet sting. “Only comfort” implies that personal legacy, fame, even truth-as-possession are fragile rewards; the durable thing is the relay, not the runner.

Context matters: Bell wrote in a century of radical mathematical and scientific upheaval, when entire frameworks shifted within a single career. The quote reads like a professional coping mechanism turned philosophy: accept your own obsolescence, and take pride in being surpassed.