"What a price we pay for experience, when we must sell our youth to buy it."

"The mathematician lives long and lives young; the wings of his soul do not early drop off, nor do its pores become clogged with the earthy particles blown from the dusty highways of vulgar life."

"How did Biot arrive at the partial differential equation? [the heat conduction equation] . . . Perhaps Laplace gave Biot the equation and left him to sink or swim for a few years in trying to derive it. That would have been merely an instance of the way great mathematicians since the very beginnings of mathematical research have effortlessly maintained their superiority over ordinary mortals."

"There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics... We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer."

"The most extensive computation known has been conducted over the last billion years on a planet-wide scale: it is the evolution of life. The power of this computation is illustrated by the complexity and beauty of its crowning achievement, the human brain."

"Philosophy is a game with objectives and no rules. Mathematics is a game with rules and no objectives."

"You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality."

"The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be."

"Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed."

"My specific goal is to revolutionize the future of the species. Mathematics is just another way of predicting the future."

"We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world."

"He is one of those peple who would be enormously improved by death"

"The only completely consistent people are the dead."

"Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase being born is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while dying means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged."

"It is fatal to be right when the rest of the world is wrong."

"A thing can be true and still be desperate folly."

"He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder."

"Nature is earlier than man, but man is earlier than natural science."