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.

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."

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.

Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad.

A speech that's full of sparkling wit will keep its hearer grinning provided its end is close to its beginning.

Our generation has an incredible amount of realism, yet at the same time it loves to complain and not really change. Because, if it does change, then it won't have anything to complain about.

Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find what it is.

I dreamed really big when I was little.

The East is very mysterious to Westerners. Even post-Cold War, it's still an unknown entity.

Lean forward into your life. Begin each day as if it were on purpose.

I win, you win. You win, I win. The gun, I win. The fruit, you win. I win, you win.

The only intercourse possible between the knight and the dragon is battle.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.

Women always think you need a man, you need a father, as if they'd be the slightest use. Men are a dead weight, they're clumsy and maladjusted.