Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Good work is not done by 'humble' men
Most people can do nothing at all well
Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets
Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
The creative life was the only one for a serious man.
I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.
Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject.
A chess problem is simply an exercise in pure mathematics.
For any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift.
Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.
I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.
Mathematics may, like poetry or music, "promote and sustain a lofty habit of mind."
Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: "Yes, up to isomorphism".
I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty
Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.
No one should ever be bored. … One can be horrified, or disgusted, but one can’t be bored.
The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.
Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and ten of your own.
The case for my life... is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more
In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not.
As history proves abundantly, mathematical achievement, whatever its intrinsic worth, is the most enduring of all.
There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain.
All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.
It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game
They [formulae 1.10 - 1.12 of Ramanujan] must be true because, if they were not true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them.
No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.
Most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity.
As Littlewood said to me once [of the ancient Greeks], they are not clever school boys or "scholarship candidates," but "Fellows of another college."
A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.
The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid's theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
... Philosophy proper is a subject, on the one hand so hopelessly obscure, on the other so astonishingly elementary, that there knowledge hardly counts.
I wrote a great deal... but very little of any importance; there are not more than four of five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.
A person’s first duty, a young person’s at any rate, is to be ambitious, and the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind something of permanent value.
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years.
The fact is there are few more popular subjects than mathematics. Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune.
If I could prove by logic that you would die in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but my sorrow would be very much mitigated by pleasure in the proof.
317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.
Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.
If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gratifying them than a mathematician.
A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.