A heavy warning used to be given that pictures are not rigorous; this has never had its bluff called and has permanently frightened its victims into playing for safety.

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.

Music can touch and heal that secret wound of the soul which nothing else can reach.

When you have solar panels, your electricity gets there for free, no one's figured out how to meter the sun yet. And that's good.

I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room.

Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination.

The Bible is there to enable God's people to be equipped to do God's work in God's world, not to give them an excuse to sit back smugly, knowing they possess all God's truth.

The problem with K-12 education is socialism and the solution is capitalism.

The song How do you like me now? By Toby Keith will be my personal theme song when I attend my first high school reunion.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.

He has created the poor savage with no guide but natural law, and it is to their hearts that He deigns to stoop. They are His wild flowers whose homeliness delights Him.