Ask her to wait a moment - I am almost done.

Mathematics is the queen of sciences and number theory is the queen of mathematics. She often condescends to render service to astronomy and other natural sciences, but in all relations she is entitled to the first rank.

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

To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.

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.

[On Sophie Germain] When a person of the sex which, according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men... succeeds nevertheless in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating the most obscure parts of [number theory], then without doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius.

I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect. . . Geometry should be ranked, not with arithmetic, which is purely aprioristic, but with mechanics.