Quotes from Charles Hermite

We are servants rather than masters in mathematics.

Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for 500 years.

There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation.

I turn aside with a shudder of horror from this lamentable plague of functions which have no derivatives.

Analysis takes back with one hand what it gives with the other. I recoil in fear and loathing from that deplorable evil: continuous functions with no derivatives.