Mathematician Quotes

No one is ignorant that there are two avenues by which opinions are received into the soul, which are its two principal powers: the understanding and the will.

L'on a beau se cacher a' soi-me" me, l'on aime toujours. We vainly conceal from ourselves the fact that we are always in love.

One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person.

There is no arena in which vanity displays itself under such a variety of forms as in conversation.

He who does not know his way to the sea should take a river for his guide.

(Man,) the glory and the scandal of the universe.

The past and present are only our means; the future is always our end. Thus we never really live, but only hope to live.

Since [man] is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he was made, and the infinite in which he is swallowed up.

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.

That which makes us go so far for love is that we never think that we might have need of anything besides that which we love.

Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.

It is not only old and early impressions that deceive us; the charms of novelty have the same power.

Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by setting out in order the causes of love; that would be absurd.

Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.

Education produces natural intuitions, and natural intuitions are erased by education.

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

It is not shameful for a man to succumb to pain and it is shameful to succumb to pleasure.

Our achievements of today are but the sum total of our thoughts of yesterday. You are today where the thoughts of yesterday have brought you and you will be tomorrow where the thoughts of today take you.

The multitude which is not brought to act as a unity, is confusion. That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny.

By thought I embrace the universe.

Continuity in everything is unpleasant.

Habit is a second nature, which destroys the first.

...for the truth is always older than all the opinions men have held regarding it; and one should be ignoring the nature of truth if we imagined that the truth began at the time it came to be known.

Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

The property of power is to protect.

We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.

I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.

Mankind suffers from two excesses: to exclude reason, and to live by nothing but reason.

We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them.

As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.

All our dignity lies in our thoughts.

What matters it that man should have a little more knowledge of the universe? If he has it, he gets little higher. Is he not always infinitely removed from the end, and is not the duration of our life equally removed from eternity, even if it lasts ten years longer?

The heart has arguments with which the logic of mind is not aquainted.

The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in others.

Jurisdiction is not given for the sake of the judge, but for that of the litigant.

Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.

Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted.

Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain. (Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)

Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.

Those who are clever in imagination are far more pleased with themselves than prudent men could reasonably be.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty. We seek happiness, and find only misery and death. We cannot but desire truth and happiness, and are incapable of certainty or happiness.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

Man is so made that by continually telling him he is a fool he believes it, and by continually telling it to himself he makes himself believe it. For man holds an inward talk with himself, which it pays him to regulate.

The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim.

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

We are so presumptuous that we wish to be known to all the world, even to those who come after us; and we are so vain that the esteem of five or six persons immediately around us is enough to amuse and satisfy us.

The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and the senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.

We are not satisfied with real life; we want to live some imaginary life in the eyes of other people and to seem different from what we actually are.

Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything...

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.

Our senses will not admit anything extreme. Too much noise confuses us, too much light dazzles us, too great distance or nearness prevents vision, too great prolixity or brevity weakens an argument, too much pleasure gives pain, too much accordance annoys.

All the trouble in the world is due to the fact that man cannot sit still in a room.

The origins of disputes between philosophers is, that one class of them have undertaken to raise man by displaying his greatness, and the other to debase him by showing his miseries.

The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.

Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.

Admiration spoils all from infancy.