God created infinity, and man, unable to understand infinity, had to invent finite sets.

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of "proving theorems." Is a writer's job mainly that of "writing sentences?"

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

Nature imitates mathematics.

The progress of mathematics can be viewed as progress from the infinite to the finite.

There is something in statistics that makes it very similar to astrology.

[In mathematics] There are two kinds of mistakes. There are fatal mistakes that destroy a theory, but there are also contingent ones, which are useful in testing the stability of a theory.

Are mathematical ideas invented or discovered? This question has been repeatedly posed by philosophers through the ages and will probably be with us forever.

Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere.

It is a common public relations gimmick to give the entire credit for the solution of famous problems to the one mathematician who is responsible for the last step.

The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated.

Keep your heart and mind open to allow things to come in.

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

I would say that I've been lucky. Being blessed and not really ever giving up.

All the love and joy that a man has ever received in perception is laid up in him as the sunshine of a hundred years is laid up in the bole of the oak.

People are not very pro-active in general, I think, because we are too busy rushing blindly towards our own goals.

This was released I think in February and so it is a great deal of fuss being made, it hasn't in fact been given public release, it was released in February.

Doctors and nurses seemed to have been born and raised in the hospital, with only short punctuations of absenteeism for such things as schooling and marriage.

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

The temptation to use mathematics is irresistible for economists. It appears to convey the appropriate air of scientific authority and precision to economists' musings.