Time makes fools of us all. Our only comfort is that greater shall come after us.
'Obvious' is the most dangerous word in mathematics.
It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.
The pursuit of pretty formulas and neat theorems can no doubt quickly degenerate into a silly vice, but so can the quest for austere generalities which are so very general indeed that they are incapable of application to any particular.
The mistakes and unresolved difficulties of the past in mathematics have always been the opportunities of its future.
Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth.
If indeed, as Hilbert asserted, mathematics is a meaningless game played with meaningless marks on paper, the only mathematical experience to which we can refer is the making of marks on paper.
The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.
