Mathematician

Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays to the devil.

Seek simplicity but distrust it.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

We think in generalities, but we live in detail.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.

When you're average, you're just as close to the bottom as you are the top.