Stanislaw Ulam Quotes

I still tour like a man possessed, because I am.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

I don't write these stories for the rewards that come back to me. I write them because I have to write them. It's a sickness on some level. It's a compulsion.

If I take up something, then it's only because I love it so. It makes no sense to leave it just because I got a better offer.

I think math is exciting, you know.

Don't pursue something because you 'want to be great.' Pursue something because it fascinates you, because the pursuit itself engages and compels you.

An ambition is a little creeper that creeps and creeps in your heart night and day, singing a little song, "Come and find me, come and find me."

I am possessed by love and have no options.

It is always noteworthy that all those who seriously study this science [the theory of numbers] conceive a sort of passion for it.

She was everything he'd ever wanted, beauty and fire arching against his despoiling hands.

The object of ambition, unlike that of love, never being wholly possessed, ambition is the more durable passion of the two.

Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos [mathematics], where pure thought can dwell in its natural home.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

I stared into Jared's eyes, and the strangest thing happened. All the melting and melding I had just been through was shoved aside, into the smallest part of my body, the little corner that I took up physically. The rest of me yearned toward Jared with the same desperate, half-crazed hunger I'd felt since the first time I'd seen him here. This body barely belonged to me or to Melanie-it belonged to him.

I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything, anything I ever did, I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion.

I'll take your breath any way you give it to me, Shura.

A lover's soul lives in the body of his mistress.

If he's forgotten me, I'll make him remember me. I'll make him want me again.

You are mine-you know you're mine!" he cried wildly...the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened...the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.

My life is music, and in some vague, mysterious and subconscious way, I have always been driven by a taut inner spring which has propelled me to almost compulsively reach for perfection in music, often - in fact, mostly - at the expense of everything else in my life.

Loving if the answering breast Seem not to be thus possessed, Still in hoping have a care; If it do, beware, beware! But if in yourself you find it, Above all things mind it, mind it!

Never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you have ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Everything.

A man like me cannot live without a hobby-horse, a consuming passion - in Schiller's words a tyrant. I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology. It has always been my distant, beckoning goal and now since I have hit upon the neuroses, it has come so much the nearer.