Edmund Husserl Quotes

You can get a certain amount of pleasure as a mathematical spectator, reading and watching some of the most beautiful arguments that have been created in the history of humanity. But that's too passive.

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

I look for material that both interest me and challenges me. If I am drawn to the material and I have to work hard at it, the characters and the plots reflect the hours and hours of research.

Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.

It is my nature to thin where others read.

It's fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way - even if you don't solve it at the end of the day.

There are a lot of actors out there who are able to engage with something in themselves which isn't necessarily their brain. But personally I find it very intellectually satisfying: doing your research and then burrowing as deeply into character as you can. I'm a naturally inquisitive person, too, and acting does feed into that.

Philosophy is the highest music.

Some advice: keep the flame of curiosity and wonderment alive, even when studying for boring exams. That is the well from which we scientists draw our nourishment and energy. And also, learn the math. Math is the language of nature, so we have to learn this language.

I've got to start using my brain more - I've got to be more ethereal and more enlightened.

The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Creating a body of mathematics is about intellectual labor, not some kind of transcendental revelation. There are plenty of important components of European fractal geometry that are missing from the African version.

Thus, the more succinctly a train of thought was expounded, and the more comprehensive the unity of its basic idea, the closer it would approximate to the prerequisites of the mathematical way of thinking.

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Further, the dignity of the science itself seems to require that every possible means be explored for the solution of a problem so elegant and so celebrated.

Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation.

I tried reading Hilbert. Only his papers published in mathematical periodicals were available at the time. Anybody who has tried those knows they are very hard reading.

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.

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

You can have fun, but you also have to put on your thinking cap every day.

But mathematics is the sister, as well as the servant, of the arts and is touched by the same madness and genius.

It takes an extraordinary intelligence to contemplate the obvious.

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Maths should be more practical and more conceptual, but less mechanical.