It seems to methat there are statements about the world andourlivesthat havenoneedofformalproof procedures.

-Boyd,William Andrew Murray
  Brazzaville Beach,'Fermat's Last Theorem II'.

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

-DeVries, Peter
  The Mackerel Plaza, ch.1.

I think it is something of the same sort of security we should seek in our relationship with God. The most flawless proof of the existence of God isno substitute for it; and if we have that relationship, the most convincing disproof is turned aimlessly aside.If I may say it with reverence, the soul and God laugh together over so odd a conclusion.

-Eddington, SirArthur Stanley
  Science and the Unseen World.

To divide a cube into two other cubes, a fourth power or in general any power whatever into two powers of the same denominationabovethesecond isimpossible, and Ihave assuredly found anadmirable proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it.

-Fermat, Pierre de
Scribbled note in the margins of his copy of Diophantus's Arithmetica. He did not live to provide the promised proof, and the conjecture became famous as Fermat's Last Theorem. In 1993  Andrew Wiles, a British mathematician, claimed to have discovered the proof.

O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleamingö Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the clouds of the fight, O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming! Keynes And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through thenight that our flag was still there; O! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?

-Key, Francis Scott
  'The Star-Spangled Banner', originally published as'The Defence of Fort M'Henry' in the Baltimore Patriot, 20 Sep; it commemorates the bombardment of Fort McHenry, Baltimore, by the British,13^14 Sep.

In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence.

-Newton, Sir Isaac
Attributed.

: (sits down opposite his fatheröcontemptuously).Yes, facts don't mean a thing, do they? What you want to believe, that's the only truth! (Derisively.) Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic, for example. : (stubbornly). So he was. The proof is in his plays.

-O'Neill, Eugene Gladstone
EDMUNDTYRONE1939^41 Long Day's Journey Into Night, act 4 (published1956).

Scribitur ad narrandum, non ad probandum. It is written for the purpose of narrative, not of proof.

-Quintilian properly Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
Of history. Institutio Oratoria,10.1.31 (translated by H E Butler, 1968).

What would happen if†men could menstruate and women could not? Clearly, menstruationwould become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much.Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood† Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite †'mens-truation'as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat† If men could menstruate, the power justifications would go on and on. If we let them.

-Steinem, Gloria
  'If Men could Menstruate', collected in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983).

Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

-Thompson, Hunter S(tockton)
  'Those DaringYoung Men InTheir Flying Machines†Ain't WhatThey UsedTo Be!', in Pageant, Sep.