Pain is the only reward for clinging to impossible dreams. " (Harry Braxton)
God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.
Rigour is to the mathematician what morality is to men.
In the future, as in the past, the great ideas [of mathematics] must be simplifying ideas, the creator must always be one who clarifies, for himself, and for others, the most complicated issues of formulas and concepts.
Every mathematician worthy of the name has experienced. . . the state of lucid exaltation in which one thought succeeds another as if miraculously. . . this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days. Once you have experienced it, you are eager to repeat it but unable to do it at will, unless perhaps by dogged work. . . .
First rate mathematicians choose first rate people, but second rate mathematicians choose third rate people.
When a branch of mathematics ceases to interest any but the specialists, it is very near its death, or at any rate dangerously close to a paralysis, from which it can be rescued only by being plunged back into the vivifying source of the science.
Love is purely a creation of the human imagination. . . the most important example of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
Chastity is the lily of virtues, and makes men almost equal to Angels. Everything is beautiful in accordance with its purity. Now the purity of man is chastity, which is called honesty, and the observance of it, honor and also integrity; and its contrary is called corruption; in short, it has this peculiar excellence above the other virtues, that it preserves both soul and body fair and unspotted.
The present moment is where eternity exists.
A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.