Indolent Quotes (2 quotes)
Mathematics has often been characterized as the most conservative of all sciences. This is true in the sense of the immediate dependence of new upon old results. All the marvellous new advancements presuppose the old as indispensable steps in the ladder. … Inaccessibility of special fields of mathematics, except by the regular way of logically antecedent acquirements, renders the study discouraging or hateful to weak or indolent minds.
In Number and its Algebra (1896), 136.
To judge in this [utilitarian] way demonstrates … how small, narrow and indolent our minds are; it shows a disposition always to calculate the reward before the work, a cold heart and a lack of feeling for everything that is great and honours mankind. Unfortunately one cannot deny that such a mode of thinking is common in our age, and I am convinced that this is closely connected with the catastrophes which have befallen many countries in recent times; do not mistake me, I do not talk of the general lack of concern for science, but of the source from which all this has come, of the tendency to look out everywhere for one’s advantage and to relate everything to one’s physical well being, of indifference towards great ideas, of aversion to any effort which derives from pure enthusiasm.
Epigraph before title page, T. W. Körner, The Pleasures of Counting (1996).
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
