You have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

The total number of Dirichlet's publications is not large: jewels are not weighed on a grocery scale.

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again; the never-satisfied man is so strange if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully,but in order to begin another. I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others.

I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of.

When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

You have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!