Am I really a good mathematician?

Mathematics is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst.

The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.

A painter like Picasso, who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the tongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors.

The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil.

What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.

One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor ... is to discourage ... from expecting too much from mathematics.