If "Number rules the universe" as Pythagoras asserted, Number is merely our delegate to the throne, for we rule Number.

The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future...

Nevertheless, the consuming hunger of the uncritical mind for what it imagines to be certainty or finality impels it to feast upon shadows in the prevailing famine of substance.

The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.

If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.

Fashion as King is sometimes a very stupid ruler.

I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly.