Mahin

“People don't do mathematics because it's useful. They do it because it's interesting.”
― Paul Lockhart, Measurement

“It is better to solve one problem five different ways, than to solve five problems one way.”
― George Pólya

“In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of thirty or thirty-five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They've all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they've remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone.”
― Alexander Grothendieck

“It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.”
― Clifford A. Pickover, The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics