We prove what we want to prove, and the real difficulty is to know what we want to prove.
On prouve tout ce qu'on veut, et la vraie difficulté est de savoir ce qu'on veut prouver.
Original text (French)
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Notes from Wikiquote
Système des Beaux-Arts (1920), reported in John M. Shanahan (ed.) The Most Brilliant Thoughts of All Time (In Two Lines or Less) (1999), p. 34
Variants
"We prove anything we want to prove, and the real difficulty is to know what we want to prove."—Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 15th ed. (1980) p. 724