Mathematician Quotes

“No soul of high estate can take pleasure in slander. It betrays a weakness.”

“Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.”

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

“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”

“Force rules the world-not opinion; but it is opinion that makes use of force.”

“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.”

“Who dispenses reputation? Who makes us respect and revere persons, works, laws, the great? Who but this faculty of imagination? All the riches of the earth are inadequate without its approval.”

“All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least is this very death which I cannot escape.”

“Look for the truth, it wants to be found.”

“There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.”

“The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.”

“We feel neither extreme heat nor extreme cold; qualities that are in excess are so much at variance with our feelings that they are impalpable: we do not feel them, though we suffer from their effects.”

“The more I see of Mankind, the more I prefer my dog.”

“It is not our task to secure the triumph of truth, but merely to fight on its behalf.”

“No one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.”

“Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares than the bare contemplation of it, even when danger is far distant.”

“Man governs himself more by impulse than reason”

“Mutual cheating is the foundation of society.”

“We like to be deceived.”

“Reverend Fathers, my letters did not usually follow each other at such close intervals, nor were they so long.... This one would not be so long had I but the leisure to make it shorter.”

“Nothing is so conformable to reason as to disavow reason.”

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

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

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

“It is an appalling thing to feel all one possesses drain away.”