Great Throughts Treasury

"When the physicists ask us for the solution of a problem, it is not drudgery that they impose on us, on the contrary, it is us who owe them thanks."

"When the logician has resolved each demonstration into a host of elementary operations, all of them correct, he will not yet be in possession of the whole reality, that indefinable something that constitutes the unity... Now pure logic cannot give us this view of the whole; it is to intuition that we must look for it."

"What is a good definition? For the philosopher or the scientist, it is a definition which applies to all the objects to be defined, and applies only to them; it is that which satisfies the rules of logic. But in education it is not that; it is one that can be understood by the pupils."

"Why is it that showers and even storms seem to come by chance, so that many people think it quite natural to pray for rain or fine weather, though they would consider it ridiculous to ask for an eclipse by prayer."

"When one tries to depict the figure formed by these two curves and their infinity of intersections, each of which corresponds to a doubly asymptotic solution, these intersections form a kind of net, web or infinitely tight mesh? One is struck by the complexity of this figure that I am not even attempting to draw."

"Zero is the number of objects that satisfy a condition that is never satisfied. But as never means "in no case", I do not see that any progress has been made."