Sophie Germain

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

There is no royal road to geometry.

Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

Although I am not a mathematician, I have always been fascinated by the beauty and elegance of mathematics.

It is not the knowledge, but the act of learning, not the possession, but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

The more I study, the more I am convinced that I know nothing.

Mathematics possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

The true spirit of delight, the exhilaration, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Algebra is but written geometry and geometry is but drawn algebra.

The study of mathematics is like the Nile, beginning in minuteness but ending in magnificence.

It is a science which has for its object the most simple and general properties of magnitude.

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences and arithmetic the queen of mathematics.

The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.

The profound study of nature is the most fertile source of mathematical discoveries.

The path of discovery is not a straight line. It is a winding road, full of unexpected turns and detours.

The true mathematician is a poet at heart.