“It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but theact of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again; the never-satisfied man is so strange if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully,but in order to begin another. I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others.”
Letter to Bolyai, 1808.
“There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.”
Quoted in J R Newman, The World of Mathematics (New York 1956).
“When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.”
“I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.”
Carl Frederich Gauss