Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree.

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

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.

By explanation the scientist understands nothing except the reduction to the least and simplest basic laws possible, beyond which he cannot go, but must plainly demand them; from them however he deduces the phenomena absolutely completely as necessary.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.