Believe me,... the bitterness of life, or at least of mine, which runs through it like a strand of red, and becomes less and less endurable as I grow… - Carl Friedrich Gauss

The austere sides of life, at least of mine, which move through it like a red thread, and which one faces more and more defenselessly in old age, are not balanced to the hundredth part by the pleasurable. I will gladly admit that the same fates which have been so hard for me to bear, and still are, would have been much easier for many another person, but the mental constitution belongs to our ego, which the Creator of our existence has given us, and we can change little in it.

To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work … coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

Even though much error and hypocrisy may often be mixed in such pietistic tendencies, nevertheless I recognize with all my heart the business of a missionary as a highly honorable one in so far as it leads to civilization the still semisavage part of earth s inhabitants. May my son try it for several years.