“Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.”

“A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than their, it is because they are made with ideas.”

“It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.”

“[It] is hardly possible to maintain seriously that the evil done by science is not altogether outweighed by the good. For example, if ten million lives were lost in every war, the net effect of sci...”

“No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-t...”

“If a man has any genuine talent he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.”

“...I'm not in control and without a firm spot, like Archimedes I can't move the world - let alone your heart..”

“The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.”

“Until that moment she had not really noticed him. Now she felt as though she'd stubbed her toe on a rock, and looked down to find that it was part of a buried city.”

“It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful, like the flowers, than large, conservative, repressed, fearful, and aggressive, like the thunder lizards; a lesson, by the way, tha...”

“Nothing but truth is immortal.”

“I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality.”