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.

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

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

My young friend, I wish that science would intoxicate you as much as our good Göttingen beer! Upon seeing a student staggering down a street.

There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.

Finally, two days ago, I succeeded - not on account of my hard efforts, but by the grace of the Lord. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle was solved. I am unable to say what was the conducting thread that connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.

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.