Stanisław Ulam Quotes

The story that Dick Feynman could open safes whose combinations had been forgotten by their owners is true.

I am turned off when I see only formulas and symbols, and little text.

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 thought that the description of Don Quixote's fight with the windmills the funniest thing imaginable.

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

Mathematics may be a way of developing physically, that is anatomically, new connections in the brain.

It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs.

In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.

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.

As one sharpens a knife on a whetstone, the brain can be sharpened on dull objects of thought. Every form of assiduous thinking has its value.

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.

Whatever is worth saying, can be stated in fifty words or less.

In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.

By an incredible coincidence, Gamow and Edward Condon, who had discovered simultaneously and independently the explanation of radioactivity (one in Russia, the other in this country), came to spend the last ten years of their lives within a hundred yards of each other in Boulder.

It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.