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.
Carl Friedrich GaussIt is always noteworthy that all those who seriously study this science [the theory of numbers] conceive a sort of passion for it.
Carl Friedrich GaussAs is well known the principle of virtual velocities transforms all statics into a mathematical assignment, and by D'Alembert's principle for dynamics, the latter is again reduced to statics. Although it is is very much in order that in gradual training of science and in the instruction of the individual the easier precedes the more difficult, the simple precedes the more complicated, the special precedes the general, yet the min, once it has arrived at the higher standpoint, demands the reverse process whereby all statics appears only as a very special case of mechanics.
Carl Friedrich GaussYou have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!
Carl Friedrich GaussThere have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.
Carl Friedrich Gauss