shtufffy

Buffalo Bill's

"The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk."

I think human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law—we are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody when, in fact, everybody's nobody.

It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.

I really couldn't say why. It's just so. I just happen to have that fascination. For the regularity of nature, one might say.

Practice yourself, for heaven's sake, in little things; and thence proceed to greater.

The mathematician's sense of tension is intimately related to his sense of beauty, and is what makes mathematics worthwhile doing.