John von Neumann Quotes

But understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn't admire a friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

It takes a little blood to let the learning in.

I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you.

You have to spend some energy and effort to see the beauty of math.

It took me twenty years study and practice to work up to what I wanted to play in this performance. How can she expect to listen five minutes and understand it?

Compassion is not feeling sorry for others. It's not soft. It requires an intellectual effort.

I know how you feel," I said. "You run into something you totally don't get, and it's scary as hell. But once you learn something about it, it gets easier to handle. Knowledge counters fear. It always has.

We waste a lot of time running after people we could have caught by just standing still.

Sometimes having a big amount of time is a gift, because by the time you're at the end of the run you feel like you've figured it out finally or discovered everything you can about the character. Sometimes that's not the case.

I pluck up the good lissome herbs of sentences by pruning, eat them by reading, digest them by musing, and lay them up at length in the high seat of memory.

Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.

That kind of natural understanding doesn't develop naturally

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first.

Success isn't something you chase. It's something you have to put forth the effort for constantly. Then maybe it'll come when you least expect it. Most people don't understand that.

We have to be able to ask questions in order to answer them.

Always run after opportunities to create peace between people, to find ways to bridge differences, please. Because as long as one person continues to feel separation… …we'll all still feel it. Close the space between you and someone today. Seeing their essential goodness helps a lot.

Joy lies in the fight, in the attempt, in the suffering involved, not in the victory itself

The World requires at least ten years to understand a new idea, however important or simple it may be.

I am sure that few successful men are so-called 'natural geniuses.'

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

Ignorance is mere privation by which nothing can be produced: it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction: and, without knowing why, we always rejoice when we learn, and grieve when we forget.

One cannot understand... the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.

Mathematics is as little a science as grammar is a language.

There is nothing new to gain. On the other hand a man must lose his ignorance. That is all.