Mathematician

Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized.

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

Common sense is genius in homespun.

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them.

If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

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 requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

The task of a university is the creation of the future, so far as rational thought and civilized modes of appreciation can affect the issue.

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants act on knowledge without imagination.

The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.

I have always noticed that deeply and truly religious persons are fond of a joke, and I am suspicious of those who aren't.

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.