Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the georgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full.

There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them and feel justified in lying to them.

To think I have spent my life on absolute muck.

The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.