Carl Friedrich Gauss Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

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
All the measurements in the world do not balance one theorem by which the science of eternal truths is actually advanced.

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
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
I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of.

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
Mathematics is the Queen of the Sciences, and Arithmetic the Queen of Mathematics.

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
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
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
But in our opinion truths of this kind should be drawn from notions rather than from notations.

Carl Friedrich Gauss
Finally, two days ago, I succeeded— not on account of my hard efforts, but by the grace of the Lord. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle was solved. I am unable to say what was the conducting thread that connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.

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

Carl Friedrich Gauss