Clergyman's

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

The optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears that this might be the case.
- Ivar Ekeland

Nowadays, however, we are much more aware of the fact that the best proof in the world is worth no more than its premises: every scientific theory is transitory and provisional, in wait for a better one, and accepted only as long as the experimental results conform to its predictions.
- Ivar Ekeland

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

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.
- Ivar Ekeland

The measurement of time was the first example of a scientific discovery changing the technology.
- Ivar Ekeland