Mathematician Quotes

“I do not admire a virtue like valour when it is pushed to excess, if I do not see at the same time the excess of the opposite virtue, as one does in Epaminondas, who displayed extreme valour and extreme benevolence. For otherwise it is not an ascent, but a fall. We do not display our greatness by placing ourselves at one extremity, but rather by being at both at the same time, and filling up the whole of the space between them.”

“Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.”

“Anyone who found the secret of rejoicing when things go well without being annoyed when they go badly would have found the point.”

“Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it makes them happy, as against reason, which only makes its friends wretched: one covers them with glory, the other with shame.”

“Condition de l'homme: inconstance, ennui, inquie tude. Man's condition. Inconstancy, boredom, anxiety.”

“Our achievements of today are but the sum total of our thoughts of yesterday.”

“When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there … now instead of then.”

“How comes it that a cripple does not offend us, but a fool does? Because a cripple recognizes that we walk straight, whereas a fool declares that it is we who are silly; if it were not so, we should feel pity and not anger.”

“La dernie' re chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage, est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la premie' re. The last thing one discovers in composing a work iswhat to put first.”

“Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.”

“To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.”

“Nature, which alone is good, is wholly familiar and common.”

“If you want others to have a good opinion of you, say nothing.”

“There is nothing so insupportable to man as to be in entire repose, without passion, occupation, amusement, or application. Then it is that he feels his own nothingness, isolation, insignificance, dependent nature, powerless, emptiness. Immediately there issue from his soul ennui, sadness, chagrin, vexation, despair.”

“Man's greatness lies in his power of thought.”

“Look somewhere else for someone who can follow you in your researches about numbers. For my part, I confess that they are far beyond me, and I am competent only to admire them.”

“Generally we are occupied either with the miseries which now we feel, or with those which threaten; and even when we see ourselves sufficiently secure from the approach of either, still fretfulness, though unwarranted by either present or expected affliction, fails not to spring up from the deep recesses of the heart, where its roots naturally grow, and to fill the soul with its poison.”

“Vanity of science. Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.”

“Good deeds, when concealed, are the most admirable.”

“Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.”

“It is a dangerous experiment to call in gratitude as an ally to love. Love is a debt which inclination always pays, obligation never.”

“...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.”

“One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.”

“Those who are accustomed to judge by feeling do not understand the process of reasoning, because they want to comprehend at a glance and are not used to seeking for first principles. Those, on the other hand, who are accustomed to reason from first principles do not understand matters of feeling at all, because they look for first principles and are unable to comprehend at a glance.”

“When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”