A mathematical problem should be difficult in order to entice us, yet — David Hilbert

"Every kind of science, if it has only reached a certain degree of maturity, automatically becomes a part of mathematics."

"Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician."

"One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it."

"Aus dem Paradies, das Cantor uns geschaffen, soll uns niemand vertreiben können."

"If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?"

"Mathematics is a presuppositionless science. To found it I do not need God, as does Kronecker, or the assumption of a special faculty of our understanding attuned to the principle of mathematical induction, as does Poincaré, or the primal intuition of Brouwer, or, finally, as do Russell and Whitehead, axioms of infinity, reducibility, or completeness, which in fact are actual, contentual assumptions that cannot be compensated for by consistency proofs."