Daily Inspiration Quote by Serge Lang

Bleakness lands here with a mathematician’s deadpan precision: “Of course, there are diseases of which people die.” The opener “Of course” is doing more work than the rest of the sentence. It’s a rhetorical shrug that assumes the listener has drifted into comforting abstraction, and it yanks the conversation back to the baseline fact everyone wants to edit out. Lang isn’t offering a medical insight; he’s puncturing a style of talk that treats mortality as an embarrassing footnote.

The line’s power is its austerity. No metaphor, no pathos, no moral. Just a blunt boundary condition, the kind you can’t “optimize” away. Coming from a working mathematician, it reads like an argument against magical thinking in public life: against the fantasy that every problem is solvable if you just apply enough intelligence, enough policy, enough will. In that sense it’s not cynical so much as anti-sentimental. It insists on the cost of pretending otherwise.

The subtext is also disciplinary: Lang spent his career in a culture that prizes clean statements and hates hand-waving. The sentence has the flavor of someone correcting an overconfident claim in a seminar, except the topic is life itself. It’s a reminder that rigor isn’t coldness; it’s respect for reality, including the part that refuses to be reasoned with.