I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.

Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.

Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.

Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

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

The only royal road to elementary geometry is ingenuity.

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

The very basis of creative work is irreverence! The very basis of creative work is bold experimentation. There has never been a creator of lasting importance who has not also been an innovator.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth.

Listen to the whispers or soon you will be listening to the screams.

Young man, your problem and the reason so many like you fail, is simply because you allow yourself to give up far too early.

If forgiveness is medicine for the soul, then gratitude is vitamins.

a detestable, viscous place populated by slugs

It's good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way.

Short accounts make long friends.

This is the most powerful thing I can do! I'm going to be a writer.

Didn't anyone tell you that size doesn't matter?" "Yes, but I told him to put his pants back on and go home.

It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient of overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury, while the other may be their ruin.

Of course, bad marriages are so pervasive that they have invaded the faith community too.