[On Ian Fleming:] The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can't get on with them.
Mathematics is not a separate entity. It owes a great deal of its power and its beauty to other disciplines.
A proof is that which convinces a reasonable man; a rigorous proof is that which convinces an unreasonable man.
There are surely worse things than being wrong, and being dull and pedantic are surely among them.
. . . there are those who believe that mathematics can sustain itself and grow without any further contact with anything outside itself, and those who believe that nature is still and always will be one of the main (if not the main) sources of mathematical inspiration. The first group is identified as "pure mathematicians" (though "purist" would be more adequate) while the second is, with equal inadequacy, referred to as "applied".
To exist (in mathematics), said Henri Poincaré, is to be free from contradiction. But mere existence does not guarantee survival. To survive in mathematics requires a kind of vitality that cannot be described in purely logical terms.
In recent years we have become much more preoccupied with streamlining and organizing our subject than with maintaining its overall vitality. If we are not careful, a great adventure of the mind will become yet another profession.
Don't try to become a teacher overnight with psychological bookkeeping in your heart and educational theory in your head.
I was surrounded by nature and trying to come to terms with this blissful nature versus the inhumane mentality of war. People were being deluded by someone using the word peace
I remember everything, even the dates. But I don't want others to remember the details, just the image.
People feel that the Bible is unequivocal in stating that the age of the earth is very young and so on and so forth, and so the big things get lumped together with the lesser things. And the age of the earth is for example virtually made a touchstone of doctrine, when there's so much evidence out there in science against it.