French Mathematician Quotes

An old French mathematician said: A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street. This clearness and ease of comprehension, here insisted on for a mathematical theory, I should still more demand for a mathematical problem if it is to be perfect; for what is clear and easily comprehended attracts, the complicated repels us. ~ David Hilbert

Is is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. ~ Henri Poincare

My father always wanted to be 'Col-bear.' He lived in the same town as his father, and his father didn't like the idea of the name with the French pronunciation. So my father said to us, 'Do what you want. You're not going to offend anybody.' And he was dead long before I made my decision. ~ Stephen Colbert

It does seem true that a young woman may sometimes behave in a way that can be called titillating, and that men take such behavior as being directed entirely at them. [...]
I've often seen blushing young men with shining eyes behave in the same way, but no one says of them that they want to be raped. If, after taking a few steps forward, they then decide to retreat, no one accuses them of being cunt teasers. In fact, the disappointed woman probably thinks it's all her fault. ~ Marilyn French

I wasn't born Austrian; I wasn't born German. My roots are from Africa, and I do not have any reason for not wanting to celebrate that. Every time that I can, I like to kind of mention it, you know, just to keep people sort of knowing exactly what's going on. My French is pretty good, but I'm still African, thank you very much. ~ Jessye Norman

Both back when I was acting and now that I'm writing, I've always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing. ~ Tana French

Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

You wanna know if I'm religious? I sure haven't made a dent in the pew, but boy do I thank God. For ever morning I get to wake up and my coffee's hot and your mom's right there next to me at the breakfast table. I thank God I get to work this ranch for a living instead of having to put on a necktie and commute to some office. I get to smell sage and pinon instead of traffic exhaust. Somebody or something made a beautiful place in this ugly world, and saw fit to put me right in the middle of it. Now, whether there's some old fella with a beard floating on a cloud up there or just some...cosmic energy or whatnot, I got no idea. But whatever God is, wherever He lives, I thank Him because, I tell you what, I can look back on every minute of it, good and bad, and I can tell you that I've had one hell of a life. Pardon my French" -Walter ~ Meagan Brothers

An angel passed. that's what the French say about a comfortable silence. ~ Marc Levy

Machismo requires Latin blood. I'd say I never experienced machismo up close until I worked in a French office; the typical Wall Street gunner has the soul of a coffee filter in comparison. ~ Rosecrans Baldwin

Incidentally, Modi also attracted immense interest from overseas groups led by industrialists as big as French-Iranian billionaire Pierre Morad Omidyar, who founded eBay. He is rumoured to have funded Modi's elections. Jayant Sinha, a former Omidyar Network partner, is now a junior minister in the Modi government. ~ Ullekh NP

They could be French," said Pepper doggedly. "France is famous for onions."
"It doesn't matter," said Adam, who was getting fed up with onions. "France is nearly Spanish, an' I don't expect witches know the difference, what with spendin' all their time flyin' around at night. It all looks like the Continong to witches. Anyway, if you don't like it you can jolly well go and start your own Inquisition, anyway. ~ Neil Gaiman

I like French fries; I like mashed. I love potatoes. ~ Mary J. Blige

My film is in French. It's not something folkloric. It's who we are. There's this tension about immigrants coming in. Will they learn French? Will they adapt? In this film, I'm on the reverse side because Monsieur Lazhar comes from a society where French is also the second language. ~ Philippe Falardeau

What is most frightening about Vautrin's lecture is that his brisk portrait of Restoration society contains such precise figures. As I will soon show, the structure of the income and wealth hierarchies in nineteenth-century France was such that the standard of living the wealthiest French people could attain greatly exceeded that to which one could aspire on the basis of income from labor alone. Under such conditions, why work? And why behave morally at all? Since social inequality was in itself immoral and unjustified, why not be thoroughly immoral and appropriate capital by whatever means are available? The ~ Thomas Piketty

It's only because I feel like such a philistine spending all that time in hair and makeup that I started to knit. I used to spend that time studying Italian and French. Then after I had two kids, my brain turned to mush and I took up knitting. ~ Felicity Huffman

I can't explain the alchemy that transmuted one evening into the equivalent of years held lightly in common. The only way I can put it is that we recognized, too surely even for surprise, that we shared the same currency. ~ Tana French

Everything depends on whether we have for opponents those French tricksters or those daring rascals, the English. I prefer the English. Frequently their daring can only be described as stupidity. In their eyes it may be pluck and daring. ~ Manfred Von Richthofen

The Italians are wise before the deede, the Germanes in the deede, the French after the deede.
[The Italians are wise before the deed, the Germens in the deed, the French after the deed.] ~ George Herbert

If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information: french-fried potatoes are out. ~ Jean Kerr

I have had some problems because the French don't like people to have success, they don't like the number one. ~ Alain Prost

Conscience, my dear, is a kind of stick that everyone picks up to thrash his neighbor with, but one he never uses against himself. ~ Honore De Balzac

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game. ~ G.H. Hardy

I wake in the night. Or sometimes I don't wake in the night. It hardly seems to make a difference. ~ Nicci French

As time went by, matters improved; the armies, especially the British and French Armies, became better at staying alive while killing larger numbers of the enemy which, though hardly a matter for satisfaction in human terms, is what well-trained armies are supposed to do. ~ Robin Neillands

Some things are like that - they strike you as repugnant for instinctive reasons, probably having to do with your culture and the way you were raised. The French word "gauche" comes to mind, but I preferred the Hebrew word "treyf." Literally, it means not kosher, but I also use it to describe things like cars, bars, strip clubs, guns, dogs, rock-n-roll, and football games. Things that are treyf, you avoid, not because you hate them per se, but because in avoiding them you keep yourself from becoming like the people you hate. ~ Aaron Cometbus

The greatest difficulty we have faced is the neocolonial way of thinking that exists in this country. We were colonized by a country, France, that left us with certain habits. For us, being successful in life, being happy, meant trying to live as they do in France, like the richest of the French. ~ Thomas Sankara

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

It is a proof of the divergence of the tendencies of the socialist and the bourgeois pictures of history - and from now on there will be two distinct historical cultures running side by side without ever really fusing - that people who have been brought up on the conventional version of history and know all about the Robespierrist Terror during the Great French Revolution, should find it an unfamiliar fact that the Terror of the government of Thiers executed, imprisoned or exiled more people - the number has been estimated at a hundred thousand - in that one week of the suppression of the [Paris] Commune [of 1871] than the revolutionary Terror of Robespierre had done in three years. ~ Edmund Wilson

I could no longer picture Rosalind in my mind's eye; the tender vision of the girl in white had been blown to pieces as if by a nuclear bomb. This was something unimaginable, something hollow as the yellowed husks that insects leave behind in dry grass, blowing with cold alien winds and a fine corrosive dust that shredded everything it touched. ~ Tana French

During Mr. Reagan's trip to Europe ... members of the traveling press corps watched him doze off so many times
during speeches by French President Francois Mitterrand and Italian President Alessandro Pertini, as well as during a one-on-one audience with the Pope
that they privately christened the trip 'The Big Sleep.' ~ Mark Hertsgaard

There was something intoxicating about this. I kept wanting to laugh, just at the lavish giddy freedom of it: relatives and countries and possibilities spread out in front of me and I could pick whatever I wanted, I could grow up in a palace in Bhutan with seventeen brothers and sisters and a personal chauffeur if I felt like it. ~ Tana French

Men seem unable to feel equal to women: they must be superior or they are inferior. ~ Marilyn French

If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living. ~ Friedrich Engels

Mathematics is fun if you don't let mathematicians push you around when you are doing it. ~ Jack Edmonds