Chance ... must be something more than the name we give to our ignorance.

In the old days when people invented a new function they had something useful in mind. Now, they invent them deliberately just to invalidate our ancestors' reasoning, and that is all they are ever going to get out of them.

I entered an omnibus to go to some place or other. At that moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with non-Euclidean geometry.

Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

Guessing before proving! Need I remind you that it is so that all important discoveries have been made?

Einstein does not remain attached to the classical principles, and when presented with a problem in physics he quickly envisages all of its possibilities. This leads immediately in his mind to the prediction of new phenomena which may one day be verified by experiment.

One does not ask whether a scientific theory is true, but only whether it is convenient.