“Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.”

“It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.”

“Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. Immortality may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of ...”

“[It] is hardly possible to maintain seriously that the evil done by science is not altogether outweighed by the good. For example, if ten million lives were lost in every war, the net effect of sci...”

“No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-t...”

“If a man has any genuine talent he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“Music is the melody that longs to be heard by someone who can appreciate it.”

“BE the music, DO the math, HAVE the dream!”

“When a friend introduced me to a Bach chaconne, he started by describing it by saying that it has 256 measures (256=2^8) divided into 4 sections of 64 measures (64=2^6), and I liked it even before ...”

“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”

“Listen, everything is possible in here. You can burn every spinning wheel in the kingdom. You can cut your hair before he ever gets the chance to climb up. It is possible to decline the beanstalk. ...”

“Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.”