Ivar Ekeland

"We do not discover mathematical truths; we remember them from our passages through this world outside our own."

"What is needed is courage: it is always so much easier to accept what you are being told than to think for yourself."

"An equilibrium is not always an optimum; it might not even be good. This may be the most important discovery of game theory."

"The social world is not driven by natural laws and randomness alone, as the physical world is, but also by human wills."

"The measurement of time was the first example of a scientific discovery changing the technology."

"So every possible reality, once God gives it existence, will reveal its own identity. Its life will unfold slowly, whereas God encompasses it at a single glance."

"If there is a God, he has left no tracks in the laws of physics; or if he has, he has covered them up very well."

"Nowadays, however, we are much more aware of the fact that the best proof in the world is worth no more than its premises: every scientific theory is transitory and provisional, in wait for a better o…"