Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.

Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.

Euclid taught me that without assumptions there is no proof. Therefore, in any argument, examine the assumptions.

Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future...

The only royal road to elementary geometry is ingenuity.

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

The very basis of creative work is irreverence! The very basis of creative work is bold experimentation. There has never been a creator of lasting importance who has not also been an innovator.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

There is only one purpose in life, which is happiness. We attain happiness by serving others with love and kindness.

I second that. This is all so creepy. I feel like we are in some sort of strange movie, forget an episode of Buffy. We have passed into official horror movie territory.”-Nessa and Cora

So prodigal was I of youth Forgetting I was young I worshipped dead men for their strength Forgetting I was strong.

In every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone's brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others.

Comedy is hard to do. All the cliches about it are true.

Knowledge enormous makes a god of me.

If I a fancy take To black and blue, That fancy doth it beauty make.

I often daydream about the future, thinking of the world in 100, 200 years, imagining what it looks like, feels like. I hope that my books are like ghosts that will inhabit this future.

You know what's more difficult to do organically? Laughing. It's actually one of the hardest things to do on camera.

Hitler was without a doubt exceptional in his criminal deeds. Yet in many respects, he was not at all out of the ordinary.