Quotes by Mathematicians - Page 5

William James used to preach the 'will to believe.' For my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt' ... what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.

Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.

One should respect public opinion in so far as it is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'"- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Ch. 1

Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!

Religion divides us, while it is our human characteristics that bind us to each other.

Let the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fall, soundless in the moldering woods.

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!

The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

To be able to use leisure intelligently will be the last product of an intelligent civilization.

A likely story indeed!" said the Pigeon, in a tone of the deepest contempt. "I've seen a good many little girls in my time, but never one with such a neck as that! No, no! You're a serpent; and there's no use denying it. I suppose you'll be telling me next that you never tasted an egg!""I have tasted eggs, certainly," said Alice, who was a very truthful child; "but little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you know.""I don't believe it," said the Pigeon; "but if they do, then they're a kind of serpent: that's all I can say.

The belief that personality is mysterious and irreducible has no scientific warrant, and is accepted chiefly because it is flattering to our human self esteem.

A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content.

Little Alice fell d o w nthe hOle, bumped her head and bruised her soul

I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.

But we have reason to think that the annihilation of work is no less a physical impossibility than its creation, that is, than perpetual motion.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

When we look ahead to 2018, we should expect big steps forward in science to come once again from changes in style rather than from marginal improvements in technology.