“It requires a much higher degree of imagination to understand the electromagnetic field than to understand invisible angels. … I speak of the E and B fields and wave my arms and you may imagine that I can see them … [but] I cannot really make a picture that is even nearly like the true waves.”

“I can imagine anything! That's the trouble with me. I can imagine things now — this minute. I could even make them sound all right, but of course none of them would be true.”

“As a mathematician Erdös is what in other fields is called a "natural". If a problem can be stated in terms he can understand, though it may belong to a field with which he is not familiar, he is as likely as, or even more likely than, the experts to find a solution.”

“p>Fierce and gentle,
Loud and silent,
The river doesn't understand itself.
The wave doesn't find itself, until it reaches the sea.Oh the wave passes,
And the waves to come will be the same.
Hunger for love
Is strong in the heart.Standing before the waves,
I think of you and me.
I think of the great sea
And I wonder where the waves come from.The waves must come from the wind.
And I wonder where the wind comes from,
And I wonder
When will we love each other again?The waves deep in the sea
And the waves on the sea's surface
Long for the shore of the sea.
Day and night the waves cannot sleep
As I can not sleep, even in dreams,
Because of my longing for you.When I go to the North,
Or to the South,
When I go anywhere, I think of you,
My only direction.Out in the great sea
Thousands of waves are pushing,
Which one never reachs the shore
Even miles and miles from home?Life is so long;
Years and months go by.
Like the sea, life is endless.
Clouds fly to the distant horizon.How can I become
Like the hundreds of thousands of small waves
In the great sea of love
And lap forever against your shore?”

“A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true.”

“Oh and the waves are going out
Oh and the waves are coming in
Out of the corner of my eye
I think I see you standing outside
But it's just your shirt
Hanging on the washing line
Waving it's arm as the wind blows by
And it looks so alive
Nice and white
Just like it's climbed right out
of my washing machine…”

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

“I don't understand my feelings. I really don't. I don't understand how I could hate you so much after so much time. How, no matter how much I'd like to not hate you, I hate you even more. It grows.”

“I make the most outrageous demands on my imagination and leave aside everything else, theory and nature study, as other people understand them. This is the only way I can work, drawing on nothing but my own faculty of imagination with I feed without stint – except in working hours.”

“It would be madness to imagine that I or anybody else has private thoughts, private and independent: the self is the sum of the understanding the self, only when I can understand that there is also you, I can perceive my deeds and to be.”