Galois read the geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

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.

I consider myself always a humorist. And I think anybody who tells jokes or makes people laugh is humor.

The big rumor going around is, we may begin bombing Iraq. Or, as the White House calls it, Operation Keep Enron Off The Front Page.

You do have an eye for the tarnished lining.

I am going to go out a winner if I have to find a high school race to win my last race.

Your forties is not the time to be thinking about getting pregnant.

The truths I shun follow me, mumbling.

I love the stage. I'm always sniffing around to see if there's something I can squidge in quickly.

She seems sort of lost.' I thought, Lost how? How am I lost? Suddenly I felt lost.

Don't allow missed opportunities of the past interfere with the opportunities that are right before you.

Begin with the end in mind. Start with the end outcome and work backwards to make your dream possible.