Make me the the master of education, and I will undertake to change the world.

I know how to control the Universe. Why would I run to get a million, tell me?

It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all.

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.

Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad.

When the armistice was declared American forces had fought their way to Sedan.

I work in celestial mechanics, but I am not interested in getting to the moon.

A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.

The inner circle of pure mathematicians will respond to the book with delight.

Mathematics is much less formally complete and precise than computer programs.

Education with inert ideas is not only useless; it is above all things harmful.

The 'silly question' is the first intimation of some totally novel development.

Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.

The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.

Eureka! [I have found it!] On discovery of a method to test the purity of gold.

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

Our own interests are still an exquisite means for dazzling our eyes agreeably.

You corrupt religion either in favour of your friends, or against your enemies.

Most of the evils of life arise from man's being unable to sit still in a room.

The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.

True eloquence makes light of eloquence. True morality makes light of morality.

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?

Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

The infinite! No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that there are paradoxes in mathematics.

If we have no idea why a statement is true, we can still prove it by induction.

Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.

But in simple substances the influence of one monad over another is ideal only.

But for harmony beautiful to contemplate, science would not be worth following.

A proof only becomes a proof after the social act of "accepting it as a proof".

I am a Lutheran astrologer, I throw away the nonsense and keep the hard kernel.

The first lecture of each new year renews for most people a light stage fright.

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.

Exaggerated self-importance is deemed an individual fault, but a racial virtue.

Mathematics is nothing more, nothing less, than the exact part of our thinking.

I can see that, without being excited, mathematics can look pointless and cold.

Mathematics - this may surprise or shock some - is never deductive in creation.

The numbers are a catalyst that can help turn raving madmen into polite humans.

Are not most professional mathematicians spared all trouble incident to income?

Virtually every discipline and endeavor is presently under a naturalistic pall.

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future.

My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Silence is the greatest persecution; never do the saints keep themselves silent.

Man is so made that if he is told often enough that he is a fool he believes it.

It is not permitted to the most equitable of men to be a judge in his own cause.

Seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied.

Abel has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years.

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