The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.
To all those who walk the path of human cooperation war must appear loathsome and inhuman.
It is easy to believe that life is long and one’s gifts are vast – easy at the beginning, that is. But the limits of life grow more evident; it becomes clear that great work can be done rarely, if at all.
More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality.
We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority.
The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized in the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment, and in the uninterrupted struggle both of individuals and humanity.
If you wish to educate a child who has gone wrong, then you must, above all, keep your attention fixed on the intersection of two charmed circles.
In this case, the neurotic resembles a human being who looks up to God, commends himself to His ways, and then religiously awaits how the Lord will guide him; he is nailed to the cross of his fiction.
Every neurotic is partly in the right.
What person, confined in a small room with nothing but a tea-cosy, will not eventually put the tea-cosy on their head?
In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown.
Mathematics is pure language – the language of science. It is unique among languages in its ability to provide precise expression for every thought or concept that can be formulated in its terms.
All failures are so because they lack social interest.
The widespread belief that Yuppies as a class would perish from Brie-cheese poisoning turned out to be over-optimistic.
If I didn’t have this affliction, I would be the first. As a rule the if-clause contains an unfulfillable condition, or the patient’s own arrangement, which only he can change.
Tears and complaints – the means which I have called water power – can be an extremely useful weapon for disturbing cooperation and reducing other to a condition of slavery.
In the company of friends, writers can discuss their books, economists the state of the economy, lawyers their latest cases, and businessmen their latest acquisitions, but mathematicians cannot discuss their mathematics at all. And the more profound their work, the less understandable it is.
Each generation has its few great mathematicians, and mathematics would not even notice the absence of the others. They are useful as teachers, and their research harms no one, but it is of no importance at all. A mathematician is great or he is nothing.
War is not the continuation of politics with different means, it is the greatest mass-crime perpetrated on the community of man.
It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring.