"It is most important in creative science not to give up. If you are an optimist you will be willing to "try" more than if you are a pessimist."

“Thanks to my memory, which enabled me to quote Latin and to discuss Greek and Roman civilization, it became obvious to some of my colleagues in other fields that I was interested in things outside mathematics. This lead quickly to very pleasant relationships.”

“I was still very hopeful that much work lay ahead of me. Perhaps because much of what I had worked on or thought about had not yet been put into writing, I felt I still had things in reserve. Given this optimistic nature, I feel this way even now when I am past sixty.”

“Ada came from Lwów. She was a very good looking girl who was studying mathematics at the University of Geneva. For a few years I had an off-and-on romance with her.”

“It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is.”

“What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else.”

“The mathematicians know a great deal about very little and the physicists very little about a great deal.”