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Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable.

Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful.

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.

Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful.

My work explores the frontier between rationalism and superstition and the wavering boundary between the two.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

Anything that gives us new knowledge gives us an opportunity to be more rational.

Being exposed to theory, stimulated by a basic love of concepts and mathematics, was a marvelous experience.