I began to combine this ordinary form of touring with a specifically mathematical variety. I had formed the ambition of becoming, like Hadamard, a "u… - André Weil

Kantian ethic, or what passes for it today, has always seemed to me to be the height of arrogance and folly. Claiming always to behave according to the precepts of universal maxims is either totally inept or totally hypocritical; one can always find a maxim to justify whatever behavior one chooses. I could not count the times (for example, when I tell people I never vote in elections) that I have heard the objection: "But if everyone were to behave like you..." - to which I usually reply that this possibility seems to me so implausible that I do not feel obligated to take it into account.

Is it mere coincidence that in India Pāṇini's invention of grammar had preceded that of decimal notation and negative numbers, and that later on, both grammar and algebra reached the unparalleled heights for which the medieval civilization of the Arabic-speaking world is known?

The major classic texts in analysis (Jordan, Goursat) which we had at first set out to replace aimed to set forth in a few volumes everything a beginning mathematician should know before specializing. At the end of the nineteenth century, such a claim could still be made seriously; by now it had become absurd. ... it soon became apparent that there was no alternative but to give up any idea of writing a text for college-level instruction. Above all it was important to lay a foundation that was broad enough to support the essential core of modern mathematics...