Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Obvious is the most dangerous word in mathematics.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.
In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something else.
One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.
In a completely rational society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Any teacher that can be replaced by a computer should be replaced by a computer.
We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.
The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his grasp of the main forces of civilization.
But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched with the same madness and genius.
It is the duty of all teachers, and of teachers of mathematics in particular, to expose their students to problems much more than to facts.
You know, I loved math. My mom was a math teacher.
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.
Theorems are fun especially when you are the prover, but then the pleasure fades. What keeps us going are the unsolved problems.
Mathematics is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.
The title which I most covet is that of teacher. The writing of a research paper and the teaching of freshman calculus, and everything in between, falls under this rubric. Happy is the person who comes to understand something and then gets to explain it.
or simply:
