Quotes

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.
-Karl Friedrich Gauss

An expert is a person who has all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
-Niels Bohr

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
-Thomas Edison

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
-Albert Einstein

More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
-Woody Allen

You can observe a lot by just watching.
-Yogi Berra

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
-Thomas Jefferson

I remember one occasion when I tried to add a little seasoning to a review, but I wasn't allowed to. The paper was by Dorothy Maharam, and it was a perfectly sound contribution to abstract measure theory. The domains of the underlying measures were not sets but elements of more general Boolean algebras, and their range consisted not of positive numbers but of certain abstract equivalence classes. My proposed first sentence was: "The author discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces."
-Paul Halmos

I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.
-W. C. Fields

Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.
-W. C. Fields

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
-Sydney Harris

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
-Richard Buckminster Fuller

The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these things...
-Richard Feynman

If there is a 50-50 chance that something can go wrong, then 9 times out of 10 it will.
-Paul Harvey

I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
-Oscar Wilde

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-Oscar Wilde

Life is too important to be taken seriously.
-Oscar Wilde

Genius is nothing but a great aptitude for patience.
-George-Louis De Buffon

80% of success is showing up.
-Woody Allen

Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear.
-George Carlin

The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
-Blaise Pascal

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books that come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
-Franz Kafka

A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.
-J. E. Littlewood

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
-Unknown

Mathematics is a cruel profession. Solving a mathematical problem is for most mathematicians an arduous and lengthy process which may take years, even a lifetime. The final conquest of the truth comes, if ever, inevitably tinged with disillusion, soured by the realization of the ultimate irrelevance of all intellectual endeavor.
-Gian-Carlo Rota

The Germans have aptly called Sitzfleisch the ability to spend endless hours at a desk doing grueling work. Sitzfleisch is considered by mathematicians to be a better guage of success than any of the attractive definitions of talent with which psychologists regale us from time to time.
-Gian-Carlo Rota

[The tensor calculus] is the debauch of indices.
-Elie Cartan

O Lord, if there is a Lord, save my soul, if I have a soul...
-Ernest Renan

A man's past is not simply a dead history...it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a mertited shame.
-George Eliot

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as the judge in the field of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
-Albert Einstein

In science, obsessiveness under psychological control can be a virtue.
-E. O. Wilson

Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
-Edward Gibbon

A meeting is an event at which the minutes are kept and the hours are lost.
-Murphy's Laws on Technology

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.
-Charles Darwin

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-from the poem "Little Gidding" by T. S. Eliot

If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.
-Isaac Newton

If I have not seen as far as others, it is because there were giants standing on my shoulders.
-Hal Abelson

Oh, he seems like an okay person, except for being a little strange in some ways. All day he sits at his desk and scribbles, scribbles, scribbles. Then, at the end of the day, he takes the sheets of paper he's scribbled on, scrunches them all up, and throws them in the trash can.
-J. von Neumann's housekeeper, describing her employer

He is rather a good mathematician, but he will never be as good as Schottky.
-G. Frobenius, in a letter recommending the appointment of David Hilbert at Gottingen

The worst thing you can do is to completely solve a problem.
-Dan Kleitman

The only real difference between grad school and jail is that when you get out of jail there are agencies to assist you in finding a job.
-Kevin Dooley

Football exemplifies the worst aspects of American society: violence punctuated by committee meetings.
-George F. Will

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
-Mark Twain

The Pithiest Book Review of all Time
When pygmies cast such long shadows, it must be very late in the day.
-Gian-Carlo Rota, reviewing a book on contemporary philosophers

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