Quotes from Carl Friedrich Gauss

His second motto: Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound.

You have no idea, how much poetry there is in the calculation of a table of logarithms!

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not the possession of but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.

There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.

Mathematics is the queen of science, and arithmetic the queen of mathematics.

Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no human can hasten or retard.

Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated.

It is always noteworthy that all those who seriously study this science [the theory of numbers] conceive a sort of passion for it.

I have the vagary of taking a lively interest in mathematical subjects only where I may anticipate ingenious association of ideas and results recommending themselves by elegance or generality.

To such idle talk it might further be added: that whenever a certain exclusive occupation is coupled with specific shortcomings, it is likewise almost certainly divorced from certain other shortcomings.

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

Arc, amplitude, and curvature sustain a similar relation to each other as time, motion, and velocity, or as volume, mass, and density.

I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.

If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.

To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.

When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.

The enchanting charms of this sublime science reveal only to those who have the courage to go deeply into it.

Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated.

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.