Echoes

The man who has the largest capacity for work and thought is the man who is bound to succeed.

Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Many things which nature makes difficult become easy to the man who uses his brains.

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.

If you wish to have leisure for your mind, either be a poor man, or resemble a poor man. Study cannot be helpful unless you take pains to live simply; and living simply is voluntary poverty.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Don't do anything that someone else can do. Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.

Greatness means strife for nation and man alike. A soft, easy life is not worth living, if it impairs the fibre of brain and heart and muscle. We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage... We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.

Man knows much more than he understands.

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

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize.

Force has no place where there is need of skill.

The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and makes real advances in science

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

These sudden inspirations never happen except after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable. Rest gives back to the mind its force and freshness.

All life is problem-solving.

The stomach is not to be loaded, for there is nothing so hostile to thought as a full belly.