There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no human can hasten or retard.

Less depends upon the choice of words than upon this, that their introduction shall be justified by pregnant theorems.

The greatest mathematicians, as Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, always united theory and applications in equal measure.

God's relation to spirits is not like that of a craftsman to his work, but also like that of a prince to his subjects.

Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means.

The essence of Capablanca's greatness is his rare talent for avoiding all that can complicate or confuse the conflict.

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

The SF [Supreme Fascist, i.e. God] created us to enjoy our suffering. The sooner we die, the sooner we defy His plans.

My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operation of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first.

Extremes are for us as if they were not, and as if we were not in regard to them; they escape from us, or we from them.

Le silence e ternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.

How vain painting is-we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don't admire at all.

Man's true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

I have succeeded in getting my actual work down to thirty minutes a day. That leaves me eighteen hours for engineering.

I do not mind at all that Newton is not a Cartesian provided he does not offer us suppositions like that of attraction.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future...

If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.

Imaginary numbers are a fine and wonderful refuge of the divine spirit almost an amphibian between being and non-being.

...one can hardly deny that mankind has a common store of thoughts which is transmitted from one generation to another.

The proper work of man, the grand drift of human life, is to follow reason, that noble spark kindled in us from heaven.

The world is made up of people who never quite get into the first team and who just miss the prizes at the flower show.

I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure, Sky-bound was the mind, earth-bound the body rests. [Kepler's epitaph]

A PhD in Mathematics is three years of guessing it wrong, plus one week of getting it right and writing a dissertation.

Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché... What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

No, it is a very interesting number, it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways.

Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics. Mathematics will rise to the challenge, as it always has.

Up to a point, it is better to just let the snags [bugs] be there than to spend such time in design that there are none.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

The past and present are only our means; the future is always our end. Thus we never really live, but only hope to live.

Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired: even I who write this, and you who read this.

Equality of possessions is no doubt right, but, as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might.

Absolute certainty is a privilege of uneducated minds and fanatics. - It is, for scientific folk, an unattainable ideal.

Every kind of science, if it has only reached a certain degree of maturity, automatically becomes a part of mathematics.

Success in solving the problem depends on choosing the right aspect, on attacking the fortress from its accessible side.

Most likely, logic is capable of justifying mathematics to no greater extent than biology is capable of justifying life.

Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.

Now ... the basic principle of modern mathematics is to achieve a complete fusion [of] 'geometric' and 'analytic' ideas.

[Quantity is the fundamental feature of things,] the 'primarium accidens substantiae,' ...prior to the other categories.

When we talk mathematics, we may be discussing a secondary language built on the primary language of the nervous system.

Big whorls have little whorls Which feed on their velocity And little whorls have lesser whorls, And so on to viscosity.

AB=1/4((A+B)^2-(A-B)^2) is an amazing identity, and unfortunately, I have to remind my current students how to prove it.

In 1992, when I was 16, I moved to the United States to start working on my Ph.D. at Princeton University in New Jersey.

'My dear friend, that must be a delusion, what can a circle have to do with the number of people alive at a given time?'

I want a permanent relationship, and I might feel inclined to reject anything which of its nature could not be permanent.

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