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Quotes by David Hilbert

A mathematical theory is not to be considered complete until you have made it so clear that you can explain it to the first man whom you meet on the street.
– David Hilbert
Before beginning I should put in three years of intensive study, and I haven't that much time to squander on a probable failure.
– David Hilbert
Every mathematical discipline goes through three periods of development: the naive, the formal, and the critical.
– David Hilbert
Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself.
– David Hilbert
He who seeks for methods without having a definite problem in mind seeks in the most part in vain.
– David Hilbert
How thoroughly it is ingrained in mathematical science that every real advance goes hand in hand with the invention of sharper tools and simpler methods which, at the same time, assist in understanding earlier theories and in casting aside some more complicated developments.
– David Hilbert
I have tried to avoid long numerical computations, thereby following Riemann's postulate that proofs should be given through ideas and not voluminous computations.
– David Hilbert
If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?
– David Hilbert
If one were to bring ten of the wisest men in the world together and ask them what was the most stupid thing in existence, they would not be able to discover anything so stupid as astrology.
– David Hilbert
Mathematical science is in my opinion an indivisible whole, an organism whose vitality is conditioned upon the connection of its parts.
– David Hilbert
Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.
– David Hilbert
Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.
– David Hilbert
No one shall expel us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us.
– David Hilbert
No other question has ever moved so profoundly the spirit of man; no other idea has so fruitfully stimulated his intellect; yet no other concept stands in greater need of clarification than that of the infinite.
– David Hilbert
One can measure the importance of a scientific work by the number of earlier publications rendered superfluous by it.
– David Hilbert
Physics is becoming too difficult for the physicists.
– David Hilbert
The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.
– David Hilbert
The further a mathematical theory is developed, the more harmoniously and uniformly does its construction proceed, and unsuspected relations are disclosed between hitherto separated branches of the science.
– David Hilbert
We must know. We will know.
– David Hilbert