David Hilbert Quotes

Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician.

I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as a Privatdozent. After all, the Senate is not a bath-house.

Begin with the simplest examples.

Immer mit den einfachsten Beispielen anfangen.

Keep computations to the lowest level of the multiplication table.

Sometimes it happens that a man's circle of horizon becomes smaller and smaller, and as the radius approaches zero it concentrates on one point. And then that becomes his point of view.

But he (Galileo) was not an idiot,... Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom — that may be necessary in religion, but scientific results prove themselves in time.

One of the supreme achievements of purely intellectual human activity.

If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?

If one were to bring ten of the wisest men in the world together and ask them what was the most stupid thing in existence, they would not be able to discover anything so stupid as astrology.

"Mathematics is a presuppositionless science. To found it I do not need God, as does Kronecker, or the assumption of a special faculty of our understanding attuned to the principle of mathematical induction, as does Poincaré, or the primal intuition of Brouwer, or, finally, as do Russell and Whitehead, axioms of infinity, reducibility, or completeness, which in fact are actual, contentual assumptions that cannot be compensated for by consistency proofs.

Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.

One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

Wir dürfen nicht denen glauben, die heute mit philosophischer Miene und überlegenem Tone den Kulturuntergang prophezeien und sich in dem Ignorabimus gefallen. Für uns gibt es kein Ignorabimus, und meiner Meinung nach auch für die Naturwissenschaft überhaupt nicht. Statt des törichten Ignorabimus heiße im Gegenteil unsere Losung: