Carl Friedrich Gauß > Quotes

“It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not the possession of but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“Mathematics is the queen of the sciences”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound...

{His second motto, from King Lear by Shakespeare}”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“Few, But Pure.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“There have been only three epoch-making mathematicians, Archimedes, Newton, and Eisenstein.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“As is well known the principle of virtual velocities transforms all statics into a mathematical assignment, and by D'Alembert's principle for dynamics, the latter is again reduced to statics. Although it is is very much in order that in gradual training of science and in the instruction of the individual the easier precedes the more difficult, the simple precedes the more complicated, the special precedes the general, yet the min, once it has arrived at the higher standpoint, demands the reverse process whereby all statics appears only as a very special case of mechanics.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, for a multitude of such theorems can easily be set up, which one could neither prove nor disprove. But I have been stimulated by it to bring our again several old ideas for a great extension of the theory of numbers. Of course, this theory belongs to the things where one cannot predict to what extent one will succeed in reaching obscurely hovering distant goals. A happy star must also rule, and my situation and so manifold distracting affairs of course do not permit me to pursue such meditations as in the happy years 1796-1798 when I created the principal topics of my Disquisitiones arithmeticae. But I am convinced that if good fortune should do more than I expect, and make me successful in some advances in that theory, even the Fermat theorem will appear in it only as one of the least interesting corollaries.

{In reply to Olbers' attempt in 1816 to entice him to work on Fermat's Theorem. The hope Gauss expressed for his success was never realised.}”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“Pauca sed matura. (Few, but ripe.)”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“I protest against the use of infinite magnitude as something completed, which is never permissible in mathematics. Infinity is merely a way of speaking”
― Carl Friedrich Gauß

“{In a letter to his friend Rudolf Wagner}

I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauss

“The history of the apple is too absurd. Whether the apple fell or not, how can any one believe that such a discovery could in that way be accelerated or retarded? Undoubtedly, the occurrence was something of this sort. There comes to Newton a stupid, importunate man, who asks him how he hit upon his great discovery. When Newton had convinced himself what a noodle he had to do with, and wanted to get rid of the man, he told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauß

“When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauß

“You say that faith is a gift; this is perhaps the most correct thing that can be said about it.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauß

“Allein die Schule des Lebens muss lehren, nur das Erreichbare zu wollen, und das Gute nicht deswegen zu verschmähen, weil noch etwas Besseres denkbar ist.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauß

“Das Ergebnis habe ich schon, jetzt brauche ich nur noch den Weg, der zu ihm führt.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauß

“We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our mind, space has a reality outside of our mind, so that we cannot prescribe its laws a priori.”
― Carl Friedrich Gauß