Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

Even stranger things have happened; and perhaps the strangest of all is the marvel that mathematics should be possible to a race akin to the apes.

Galois read the geometry from cover to cover as easily as other boys read a pirate yarn.

Any impatient student of mathematics or science or engineering who is irked by having algebraic symbolism thrust upon him should try to get along without it for a week.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

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