some favorite quotes

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it
all that is not gold. Leo Tolstoy

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the
only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your
anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of
your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about
you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the
sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then to learn.
Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing
which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured
by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
T. H. White, in The Once and Future King

Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten.
B. F. Skinner

The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's
blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or
erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has
often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter
in that it is only one's best moments that count and not
one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game,
whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among
many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will
make a mathematician's reputation.
Norbert Wiener, in Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth

Wir müussen wissen.
Wir werden wissen.
David Hilbert
[Engraved on his tombstone in Göttingen]

What we hope ever to do with ease we may learn first to do with diligence.
Samuel Johnson

Rigor is to the mathematician what morality is to men.
Andre Weil

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.
Alan Turing

Find out just what any people will quietly
submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice
and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
Frederick Douglass

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where the words come out
From the depth of truth
Where the tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
In ever widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my father
Let my country awake.
Rabindranath Tagore
(from his book Gitanjali)

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you
have tried to make it precise.
Bertrand Russell

For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple,
direct, understandable, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken

If people do not believe that mathematics is simple,
it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.
John Louis von Neumann

In mathematics we do not appeal to authority, but rather you are
responsible for what you believe.
Richard Hamming, Americ an Math Monthly, vol 105 no 7.

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly,
and time, which is all we have,
must be paid heavily for their acquiring.
They are the very simplest things,
and because it takes a man's life to know them
the little new that each man gets from life
is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
Ernest Hemingway
(From A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway, Random House, NY, 1966)

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful;
he studies it because he delights in it,
and he delights in it because it is beautiful.
If nature were not beautiful,
it would not be worth knowing,
and if nature were not worth knowing,
life would not be worth living.
Henri Poincaré

Believe that none of the effort you put into coming closer to God is ever
wasted -- even if in the end you don't achieve what you are striving for.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't
sleep with the window shut and a woman who can't sleep
with the window open.
George Bernard Shaw

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
Derek Bok

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.
Johann Goethe
(John Anster's translation of Faust}

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Mignon McLaughlin

Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and
go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the
midst of them all.
Buddha

If a dog barks his head off in the forest and no human hears
him, is he still a bad dog?
Anonymous

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is
just as dumb as the next guy.
Richard Feynman

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming,
is the only end in life.
Baruch Spinoza

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions, they become habits.
Watch your habits, they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Frank Outlaw

Creativity is God's gift to you. What you do with it is your gift to God.
Bob Moawad

Maturity is the ability to do a job whether or not you are supervised,
to carry money without spending it, and to bear an injustice
without wanting to get even.
Ann Landers

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.
Lao Tzu

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in
your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the
spirit.
Kahlil Gibran

The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.
Baha'u'llah