If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.

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.

It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.

It was so close to October that Halloween was knocking at his heart.

By doing extraordinary things you are contributing to create a better world. Memorable should be the new usual…

The minute you step onstage, you get eight feet taller.

Concerning great things one should either be silent or speak loftily.

The Dutch customs once thought my pictures were photos. Where on earth did they think I could have photographed my subjects? In Hell, perhaps?

One needs to be successful in the conventional way to learn just how far away from success it may be.

I'm not thinking about coaching, I'm thinking about heading to Washington, watching the world champions and my brother coach

It must have been the lack of nutrients that gave my father his temper. He is not a sweet man despite a very sweet tooth.

A customer is never out of warranty, even if his product is.