36 Quotes by Hermann Weyl

Logic is the hygiene the mathematician practices to keep his ideas healthy and strong.

Besides language and music, it [mathematics] is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind, and it is the universal organ for world understanding through theoretical construction. Mathematics must therefore remain an essential element of the knowledge and abilities which we have to teach, of the culture we have to transmit, to the next generation.

God exists because arithmetic is consistent – the Devil exists because we can’t prove it!

The objective world is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling along the lifeline of my body, does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.

The goal of mathematics is the symbolic comprehension of the infinite with human, that is finite, means.

But it seems an irony of creation that man’s mind knows how to handle things the better the farther removed they are from the center of his existence. Thus we are cleverest where knowledge matters least...

My work has always tried to unite the True with the Beautiful and when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the Beautiful.

Our generation is witness to a development of physical knowledge such as has not been seen since the days of Kepler, Galileo and Newton, and mathematics has scarcely ever experienced such a stormy epoch. Mathematical thought removes the spirit from its worldly haunts to solitude and renounces the unveiling of the secrets of Nature. But as recompense, mathematics is less bound to the course of worldly events than physics.

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.