The science of pure mathematics, in its modern developments, may claim to be the most original creation of the human spirit.
When you’re average, you’re just as close to the bottom as you are the top.
Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe.
Seek simplicity, and distrust it.
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.
It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.
Common sense is genius in homespun.
How the past perishes is how the future becomes.
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment.
It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.
The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.
Value is coextensive with reality.
The motive of success is not enough.
Education should turn out the pupil with something he knows well and something he can do well.
Apart from God every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.
The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.
The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.
Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.