Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree.

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

Theory attracts practice as the magnet attracts iron.

You have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!

There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.

Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

My daughter is not an object to flash around or a prized item to put on display.

I go through major crises every few months, but then I have great peaks of belief and creativity. I'm a weird kind of animal

The conservative idea is not that government has no role. You might have argued that in the thirties when conservatives opposed the New Deal.

Use all your hidden forces. Do not miss The purpose of this life, and do not wait For circumstance to mould or change your fate.

I couldn't care less what anyone's 'perception' of me is. I'm too long in the tooth to care.

If you don't go, you'll never know.

It was really a means-of-production problem. It costs so much to make films. With a novel, you can write the whole thing on a ream of paper from Staples for $4.

U.S. foreign policy is in every area impacted by ethnic groups of one sort or another as well as economic groups and regional groups.