Does the pursuit of truth give you as much pleasure as before? Surely it is not the knowing but the learning, not the possessing but the acquiring, not the being-there but the getting there that afford the greatest satisfaction. If I have exhausted something, I leave it in order to go again into the dark. Thus is that insatiable man so strange: when he has completed a structure it is not in order to dwell in it comfortably, but to start another.

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

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

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.

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

I am giving this winter two courses of lectures to three students, of which one is only moderately prepared, the other less than moderately, and the third lacks both preparation and ability. Such are the onera of a mathematical profession.

Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no human can hasten or retard.