A Miscellany is a collection without a natual ordering relation.

Before creation, God did just pure mathematics. Then He thought it would be a pleasant change to do some applied.

Try a hard problem. You may not solve it, but you will prove something else.

The first test of potential in mathematics is whether you can get anything out of geometry.

The infinitely competent can be uncreative.

The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it would.

A precisian professor had the habit of saying: "... quartic polynomial ax^4+bx^3+cx^2+dx+e , where e need not be the base of the natural logarithms."

I've been giving this lecture to first-year classes for over twenty-five years. You'd think they would begin to understand it by now.

A linguist would be shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is open, or again that "E is dense in E" does not mean the same thing as "E is dense in itself".

A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

Life flows as a whole, both inside and out, but you divide life with your mind, both inside and outside.

Don’t give up on yourself. Be strong!

Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

Life's gift to you is your unique vantage point. Your gift to life is expressing from it.

Death is the monster we all fear, yet with each day, we walk toward it, and can't help doing so; we can't help but walk toward the one thing we're most trying to avoid.

Plant the seed, set the target, live your life.

When accepting or preparing for a role, fear is the motivating factor.

If you lose emotion, and you gain it back, you realise that hate and love are very important to distribute properly. So I'm not going to waste any kind of emotion on things that aren't related to me.

It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.

When one is still and listens, one begins to be in touch with a mysterious element that is within each of us, which can transform and shape us and can help to transform the world.