Kurt Gödel citations

“Gödel est le plus grand logicien depuis Aristote.”

“There is a difference between a thing and talking about a thing.”

“Our total reality and total existence are beautiful and meaningful…. We should judge reality by the little which we truly know of it. Since that part which conceptually we know fully turns out to be so beautiful, the real world of which we know so little should also be beautiful. Life may be miserable for seventy years and happy for a million years: the short period of misery may even be necessary for the whole.”

“The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact. Wish is a force as applied to thinking beings, to realize something. A fulfilled wish is a union of wish and fact. The meaning of the whole world is the separation and the union of fact and wish.”

“I don't believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth.”

“Either mathematics is too big for the human mind, or the human mind is more than a machine.”

“Only someone who (like the Intuitionist) denies that the concepts and axioms of classical set theory have any meaning could be satisfied with such a solution, not someone who believes them to describe some well-determined reality. For in reality Cantor's conjecture must be either true or false, and its undecidability from the axioms as known today can only mean that these axioms do not contain a complete description of reality.”

“Ninety percent of [contemporary philosophers] see their principal task as that of beating religion out of men's heads. … We are far from being able to provide scientific basis for the theological world view.”

“The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws”

“To every ω-consistent recursive class κ of formulae there correspond recursive class signs r, such that neither v Gen r nor Neg (v Gen r) belongs to Flg (κ) (where v is the free variable of r).”

“I like Islam, it is a consistent idea of religion and open-minded.”

“But every error is due to extraneous factors (such as emotion and education); reason itself does not err.”