Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

Going to school and working for good marks, indeed working for very good marks, was a serious business.

My parents regarded school teachers as higher beings, as did many immigrants.

As Jews, their families left Russia to escape the poverty and the antisemitism.

My parents were determined to move into the middle class.

Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

About 1900 my parents came to the United States as children from what was then the Polish area of Russia.

This was good training for research, because large parts of experimental work are sometimes boring or involve the use of skills in which one is not particularly gifted.

The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.

It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.

A parent being called to the school because their child had misbehaved was as serious as a parent being called to the police station because their child had robbed a bank.

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.

Naturally, I have compensated in my adult years by owning very large numbers of books.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

They wanted me to play more sports because they were acutely sensitive to their children being one hundred percent American, and they believed that all Americans played sports and loved sports.

I was also interested in chemistry, but my parents were not willing to buy me a chemistry set.

In mathematics we have long since drawn the rein, and given over a hopeless race.

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

Mathematics is as old as Man.

I finally reached the conclusion that mathematics was the study I was best fitted to follow, though I did not clearly see in what way I should turn the subject to account.

As the existence of a corps of professors of mathematics is peculiar to our navy, as well as an apparent, perhaps a real, anomaly, some account of it may be of interest.

Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary.

What affected me most profoundly was the realization that the sciences of cryptography and mathematics are very elegant, pure sciences. I found that the ends for which these pure sciences are used are less elegant.

I read one or two other books which gave me a background in mathematics other than logic.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.

How is an error possible in mathematics?

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.

It may be true, that men, who are mere mathematicians, have certain specific shortcomings, but that is not the fault of mathematics, for it is equally true of every other exclusive occupation.

I could never accept findings based almost exclusively on mathematics. It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so.

If a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics.

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set.

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Mathematics is the most beautiful and most powerful creation of the human spirit.

Angling may be said to be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.

Mathematics is the music of reason.

I had changed from being a mathematician to a practicing scientist. I was increasingly embarassed that I could no longer follow some of the more modern branches of pure mathematics.

Well, some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve.