Mark Kac Quotes

#1. Curiosity, for which nothing is closed off, and idle talk, for which everything is supposedly understood, provide persons with the guarantee of a 'life' which, supposedly, is genuinely 'lively'.

Steven Foulds

#2. A proof is that which convinces a reasonable man; a rigorous proof is that which convinces an unreasonable man.

Mark Kac

#3. When it's said and done, the one thing I want to leave on this earth is hope. I have felt hopelessness, and it's a terrible feeling. Hopelessness will destroy you. I want to bring hope to other people.

Paula Deen

#4. In recent years we have become much more preoccupied with streamlining and organizing our subject than with maintaining its overall vitality. If we are not careful, a great adventure of the mind will become yet another profession.

Mark Kac

#5. I feel comfortable singing in the great cathedrals of the world because I spent so much time as a child singing in church. And it isn't very different. Of course, nothing looks quite like Notre Dame de Paris.

Jessye Norman

#6. All we really want in the end is to be connected once again with the Truth of our being, to realize what it is that wears this mask of self.

Adyashanti

#7. The negroes are lovers of ludicrous actions, and hence all their ceremonies seem farcical.

Isaac D'Israeli

#8. It may be appropriate to quote a statement of Poincare, who said (partly in jest no doubt) that there must be something mysterious about the normal law since mathematicians think it is a law of nature whereas physicists are convinced that it is a mathematical theorem.

Mark Kac

#9. Of all the things I've done in life, directing a motion picture is the most beautiful. It's the most exciting and the nearest than an interpretive craftsman, such as an actor can possibly get to being a creator.

Laurence Olivier

#10. Sometimes the greatest love is not found in the dramatic scenes that poets and writers immortalize. Often, the greatest manifestations of love are the simple acts of kindness and caring we extend to those we meet along the path of life.

Joseph B. Wirthlin

#11. Mathematics is not a separate entity. It owes a great deal of its power and its beauty to other disciplines.

Mark Kac

#12. For Nature is accustomed to rehearse with certain large, perhaps baser, and all classes of wild (animals), and to place in the imperfect the rudiments of the perfect animals.

Marcello Malpighi

#13. I grew up very modest, and I never forget that.

Ronnie Dunn

#14. In play, a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it is as though he were a head taller than himself.

Lev Vygotsky

#15. In the present age doubt has become immune to faith and faith has dissociated itself from doubt.

Gabriel Vahanian

#16. All beginnings are involuntary.

Fernando Pessoa

#17. The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

Lauren Groff

#18. There are surely worse things than being wrong, and being dull and pedantic are surely among them.

Mark Kac

#19. What I do when I create a character is put in details from all the people I know who might be like that person, and then put in a huge amount of myself.

Jeffrey Eugenides