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Many great failures and many great successes are due to chance and not to human folly or ingenuity.

— Ivar Ekeland The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006)

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More quotes by Ivar Ekeland

We do not discover mathematical truths; we remember them from our passages through this world outside our own.

The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006)

If there is a God, he has left no tracks in the laws of physics; or if he has, he has covered them up very well.

The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006)

An equilibrium is not always an optimum; it might not even be good. This may be the most important discovery of game theory.

The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006)

The world is full, at every scale, and every scale ignores the higher and lower ones.

The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006)

The social world is not driven by natural laws and randomness alone, as the physical world is, but also by human wills.

The Best of All Possible Worlds (2006)

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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.

Confucius

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

Martin Buber Between Man and Man (1965)

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Attribution

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