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

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

Theory attracts practice as the magnet attracts iron.

You have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!

There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.

Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

If I had a box full of all the evils of the world, I'd open it just a little way and push you inside. Then I'd close it again for always.

Compliments land assoft and gentle on my earsas a butterfly.

Well, if you can't have what you want, you could try to want what you have.

Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees but what he feels what he tells himself about what he has seen.

bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.

One day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say about you. That's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of.

Government is like junior high. Your status depends upon whom you're able to persecute.

God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding and so gives himself away. God lies in wait for us with nothing so much as love.

I like girls who really don't care what other people are thinking - girls who are a little goofy. I think that's sexy.

I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.