Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
One should not forget that the functions, like all mathematical constructions, are only our own creation, and that when the definition with which one begins ceases to make sense, one should not ask, what is, but what is convenient to assume in order that it [remain] significant.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
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.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
But in our opinion truths of this kind should be drawn from notions rather than from notations.
About the proof of Wilson's theorem

Carl Friedrich Gauss
In such apparent accidents which finally produce such a decisive influence on one s whole life, one is inclined to recognize the tools of a higher hand. The great enigma of life never becomes clear to us here below.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
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.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
One day he said: For the soul there is a satisfaction of a higher type; the material is not at all necessary. Whether I apply mathematics to a couple of clods of dirt, which we call planets, or to purely arithmetical problems, it s just the same; the latter have only a higher charm for me.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
Dark are the paths which a higher hand allows us to traverse here... let us hold fast to the faith that a finer, more sublime solution of the enigmas of earthly life will be present, will become part of us.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.

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.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
Astronomy and Pure Mathematics are the magnetic poles toward which the compass of my mind ever turns.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
Mathematics is the Queen of the Sciences, and Arithmetic the Queen of Mathematics.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
The knowledge whose content makes up astronomy is the gain from more than 2,000 years' work on one of the most abundant objects of human knowledge, in which the foremost minds of all times have summoned up all the resources of genius and diligence.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
Infinity is only a figure of speech, meaning a limit to which certain ratios may approach as closely as desired, when others are permitted to increase indefinitely.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
Mathematics... is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
I am giving this winter two courses of lectures to three students, of which one is only moderately prepared, the other less than moderately, and the third lacks both preparation and ability. Such are the onera of a mathematical profession.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
Referring to the decimal system of numeration or its equivalent (with some base other than 10): To what heights would science now be raised if Archimedes had made that discovery!

Carl Friedrich Gauss
Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no human can hasten or retard.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
In the Theory of Numbers it happens rather frequently that, by some unexpected luck, the most elegant new truths spring up by induction.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
I believe you are more believing in the Bible than I. I am not, and, you are much happier than I. I must say that so often in earlier times when I saw people of the lower classes, simple manual laborers who could believe so rightly with their hearts, I always envied them, and now tell me how does one begin this?

Carl Friedrich Gauss
Yes! The world would be nonsense, the whole creation an absurdity without immortality.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
May the dream which we call life be for you a happy dream, a foretaste of that true life which we shall inherit in our real home, when the awakened spirit shall labour no longer under the grievous bondage of the flesh, the fetters of space, the whips of earthly pain, and the sting of our paltry needs and desires. Let us carry our burdens to the end, stoutly and uncomplainingly, never losing sight of that higher goal. Glad then shall we be to lay down our weary lives, and to see the dropping of the curtain.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
If the object of all human investigation were but to produce in cognition a reflection of the world as it exists, of what value would be all its labor and pains, which could result only in vain repetition, in an imitation within the soul of that which exists without it?

Carl Friedrich Gauss
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.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
Arc, amplitude, and curvature sustain a similar relation to each other as time, motion, and velocity, or as volume, mass, and density.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
I will add that I have recently received from Hungary a little paper on non-Euclidean geometry in which I rediscover all my own ideas and results worked out with great elegance... The writer is a very young Austrian officer, the son of one of my early friends, with whom I often discussed the subject in 1798, although my ideas were at that time far removed from the development and maturity which they have received through the original reflections of this young man. I consider the young geometer J. Bolyai a genius of the first rank.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
I am coming more and more to the conviction that the necessity of our geometry cannot be demonstrated, at least neither by, nor for, the human intellect... Geometry should be ranked, not with arithmetic, which is purely aprioristic, but with mechanics.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
You say that faith is a gift; this is perhaps the most correct thing that can be said about it.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
One is forced to the view, for which there is so much evidence even though without rigorous scientific basis, that besides this material world another, second, purely spiritual world order exists, with just as many diversities as that in which we live-—we are to participate in it.

Carl Friedrich Gauss