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

“A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than their, it is because they are made with ideas.”

“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.”

“Littlewood, on Hardy's own estimate, is the finest mathematician he has ever known. He was the man most likely to storm and smash a really deep and formidable problem; there was no one else who cou...”

“You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and inte...”

“Intelligence minus purpose equals stupidity.”

“But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence ...”