Quotes

This is a small store of some quotes I've read or heard that I've liked.

“the gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account”
“We must be careful in taking lessons from experiences in other countries. The creative process seems to be highly sensitive to culture in ways that we do not understand.”
“Mathematicians are a bit like Frenchmen: when something is said to them, they translate it into their own language, and straight away it becomes something else entirely.”
“I was impressed: I understood that propaganda tried to turn us into some kind of insects. I thought then and think now that it is a most important duty of a teacher of humans to teach them to be humans, that is, to behave reasonably in unusual situations.”
“A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths”
“[Ramsey’s theorem], while simple to prove (relying on nothing more than an iterated pigeonhole principle), represented the discovery of a new phenomenon and created a new species of mathematical result: the Ramsey-type theorem, each one of which being a different formalisation of the newly gained insight in mathematics that complete disorder is impossible.”
“A thought expressed in words becomes a lie.”
“The Germans have aptly called Sitzfleisch the ability to spend endless hours at a desk doing grueling work. Sitzfleisch is considered by mathematicians to be a better gauge of success than any of the attractive definitions of talent with which psychologists regale us from time to time.”
“A positively curved geometry is one in which triangles wear long ties.”
“Buffering is a bit like salt—just the right amount of salt makes food better, but too much makes it inedible!”
“Normally I’m fairly allergic to hearing mathematicians or physicists publicly sharing their wisdom about the larger human experience (since they tend to have less of it than the average person)”
“I started conceptualizing myself as a vocational scholar. Drawing from the romanticized cultural view of addiction, I fancied myself ill-suited to the real world: interesting, insightful, but tragic and unable to take care of myself.”
“In a way, mathematics is a novel about Nature and Humankind. One cannot tell precisely what mathematics teaches us, in much the same way one cannot tell what exactly we are taught by War and Peace.”
“If a ‘religion’ is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one.”
“The number of ideas in mathematics is not large. Everything that is achieved is obtained from basic or fundamental concepts that are applied with some degree of variation. Mastering these basic concepts in one field of mathematics helps us to recognize and use them in other fields. We are so used to studying certain basic concepts for tests that we often do not notice their beauty. For example, the well-known statement that through two points one can draw one line, and that this line is unique, was a topic of thorough study by several mathematicians. In fact, every basic concept and idea was once a new and remarkable discovery!”
“So that’s a difficulty with history, especially in Physics, is that you can choose episodes from history to illustrate any polemical point you want to make, and we never know at any time which lesson we should take. Sometimes lessons that we haven’t even learned before, of course.”
“Men and women rarely admit their fear of freedom openly, however, tending rather to camouflage it—sometimes unconsciously—by presenting themselves as defenders of freedom.”
“One problem with [neologisms] is that they create this false impression that we’re facing a new set of problems because we’re using new terms, even if there are important historical connections to problems in the past.”
“[Gödel’s incompleteness theorem] acquires its mystery when you start examining it philosophically, but actually, it is simply a theorem stating that a certain structure does not have finitely many generators. Oh, my God! Such structures are a penny a pound, but just think, here is one more. The profundity appears when we add to this a particular self-referential semantics. Then it enters the philosophical foundation of mathematics.”