Godfrey Harold Hardy

“Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not.”

“Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.”

“I have never done anything 'useful'. 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.”

“The 'real' mathematics of the 'real' mathematicians, the mathematics of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Abel and Riemann, is almost wholly 'useless'.”

“Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.”

“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.”

“Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”

“Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons.”

“No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game.”

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

“The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way.”

“I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.”

“Good work is not done by 'humble' men.”

“It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics.”

“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.”