Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes

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.

The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it.

The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic.

When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again.

Ask her to wait a moment - I am almost done.

I protest against the use of infinite magnitude ..., which is never permissible in mathematics.

Mathematics is the queen of science, and arithmetic the queen of mathematics.

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

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.

Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not, and, you are much happier than I.

When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.

Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated.

The Infinite is only a manner of speaking.

Arc, amplitude, and curvature sustain a similar relation to each other as time, motion, and velocity, or as volume, mass, and density.

Less depends upon the choice of words than upon this, that their introduction shall be justified by pregnant theorems.

The total number of Dirichlet's publications is not large: jewels are not weighed on a grocery scale.

Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree.

In mathematics there are no true controversies.

His second motto: Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound.

It is always noteworthy that all those who seriously study this science [the theory of numbers] conceive a sort of passion for it.

My young friend, I wish that science would intoxicate you as much as our good Göttingen beer! Upon seeing a student staggering down a street.

I have the vagary of taking a lively interest in mathematical subjects only where I may anticipate ingenious association of ideas and results recommending themselves by elegance or generality.