Alexander Grothendieck Quotes

No rock so hard but that a little wave may beat admission in a thousand years.

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

The fall of dropping water wears away the Stone.

Paralyze resistance with persistence.

Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.

That’s one way of looking at it. I prefer to look at it another way—which is that if they are persistent enough, even tiny drops of water, over time, can change the rock forever. And it will never change back.

The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. … All history is taken in by stones.

Dripping water hollows out a stone

Water continually dropping will wear hard rocks hollow.

Time can make soft that iron wood.

"Gutta cavat lapidem." (Dripping water carves a stone.)

Hope and change are hard-fought things.

Two lost things that had survived the seas and arrived on a coastline. What did they do? They implanted themselves in the sand and grew into trees and lined the beaches. Sometimes a lot can come of being all washed up. You can really grow.

I can cope with nine of them, so they ought to be able to stand one of me. They could end the tiresomeness and stubbornness by giving me what I want.

In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.

In the end you’ll see you won’t stop me.

You see how when rivers are swollen in winter those trees that yield to the flood retain their branches, but those that offer resistance perish, trunk and all.

[On common water.] Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast up by the sea.

Most fisherman, including this one, cling to their pet stupidities as they would to a battered briar or an old jacket; and their dogged persistence in wrong methods and general wrong-headedness finally wins the a sort of grudging admiration, if not many fish.

All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and devastation only is violent and rapid.

Stones are hollowed out by the constant dropping of water.

When the aggregate amount of solid matter transported by rivers in a given number of centuries from a large continent, shall be reduced to arithmetical computation, the result will appear most astonishing to those...not in the habit of reflecting how many of the mightiest of operations in nature are effected insensibly, without noise or disorder.

What though the sea with waves continuall Doe eate the earth, it is no more at all ; Ne is the earth the lesse, or loseth ought : For whatsoever from one place doth fall Is with the tyde unto another brought : For there is nothing lost, that may be found if sought.

You can knock on a deaf man's door forever.