Mathematician

The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

The silly question is the first intimation of some totally new development.

The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, seek simplicity and distrust it.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals.

Simple solutions seldom are. It takes a very unusual mind to undertake analysis of the obvious.

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

I would be a billionaire if I was looking to be a selfish boss. That's not me.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Periods of tranquility are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like and immorality is what they dislike.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and only deeds will suffice.

Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.