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Don't cry, Alfred! I need all my courage to die at twenty.

— Évariste Galois Léopold Infeld (1978)

Ne pleure pas, Alfred ! J'ai besoin de tout mon courage pour mourir à vingt ans !

Original text (French)

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Source and credibility

Wikiquote does not flag this quote as disputed or misattributed.

Source: Quoted in: Léopold Infeld (1978) Whom the gods love: the story of Évariste Galois. p. 299.
Work: Léopold Infeld, 1978
Source quality: Secondhand citation Quoted from another book or article rather than from the original.

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[This] science is the work of the human mind, which is destined rather to study than to know, to seek the truth rather than to find it.

Of mathematics — as quoted in Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (1980)

Poisson, reading Galois' First Memoir, found the proof of Lemma III insufficient, and wrote in pencil the following comment.

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Topics

Courage

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Preserve my memory, since fate has not given me life enough for the country to know my name.

Il parait après cela qu'il n'y a aucun fruit à tirer de la solution que nous proposons. [It seems there is no fruit to be drawn from the solution we offer.]

... an author never does more damage to his readers than when he hides a difficulty.

Mais je n’ai pas le temps et mes idées ne sont pas encore bien développées sur ce terrain qui est immense. [But I don't have the time and my ideas are not yet well developed on this immense terrain.]

It angered Galois sufficiently that he wrote directly below it

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Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

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All doubt is cowardice — all trust is brave.

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Courage is never born with a person; time and circumstances inject it into a person and bring it forth from within.

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Christianity offers reasons for not fearing death or the universe, and in so doing it fails to teach adequately the virtue of courage.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Évariste Galois (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.