David Hilbert Quotes

There are a lot of clear thinkers everywhere.

I'm not sure what theory is, unless it's the pursuit of fundamental questions.

Being exposed to theory, stimulated by a basic love of concepts and mathematics, was a marvelous experience.

They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.

Intellectual comradeship requires that you think your thoughts through to the place where you can make the complex seem simple, the obscure quite clear.

He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.

I don't really get things very... intuitively. I mean, I don't immediately understand things. The only way I really get it is by writing it down.

It took me a long time to understand the relationship between ideas and between objective facts. But after I clearly understood this relationship, I didn't fool around with other wild ideas. That is one of the main reasons why I just make my scheme as simple as possible.

The problem with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds.

The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science.

I believe if you want to convey a complex philosophy, it's advisable to keep it simple: day-to-day lingo.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.

I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

He has the lucidity which is the by-product of a fundamentally sterile mind.

The times call for clear, lucid thinking rather than Clare Luceish thought.

What I knew was I liked math and science, and I never wanted to memorize everything. I wanted to understand where it came from.

Logical activity is not the whole of intelligence. One can be intelligent without being particularly logical.

And as to the faculties of the mind, setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born within us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat else.

There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being.

To solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name.

A mathematical proof must be perspicuous.

Doubt everything at least once, even the sentence "Two times two is four."

To develop thinking as a skill, it should be deliberate, focused, confident, and enjoyable.