"It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul."

Sofia Kovalevskaya 1895

 "Race and language makes no difference; the barriers are gone when persons can come together on high spiritual levels."

--Rolling Thunder, CHEROKEE

 "What you have inherited from your forefathers you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 "I love mathematics not only for its technical applications, but principally because it is beautiful; because man has breathed his spirit of play into it, and because it has given him his greatest game--the encompassing of the infinite."

Rozsa Peter

If a child is throwing rocks on the playground, let's give all the other kids rocks to throw at the kid throwing rocks. After all, the best way to stop a kid throwing rocks from hurting other kids is to give the other kids rocks to hurt him with.

Let's think about our arguments. The children are watching us.

I do not want to teach children that violence is best dealt with by putting more violence into the world.

 

“The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it”

― Søren Kierkegaard

 Yuanwu said to Miaoxi:

In whatever you do, you should be careful about the ending and the beginning. What is done well inevitably turns out well, and what starts well finishes well. If you are as careful of the end as of the beginning, then there will be no failure.

As the ancient saying goes, "What a pity that the robe yet unfinished is turned into a shirt. The hundred-mile journey is still halfway at ninety." This expresses lament at having a beginning without an end. So it is said, "Anyone can begin something, but few can bring it to a conclusion."