G. H. Hardy Quotes

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already en...

[Regarding mathematics,] there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or ba...

No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or scienc...

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanen...

[It] is hardly possible to maintain seriously that the evil done by science is not altogether outwei...

[I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with w...

The ‘seriousness’ of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usual...

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

I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it,...

The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the...

If a man has any genuine talent he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivat...

The geometer offers to the physicist a whole set of maps from which to choose. One map, perhaps, wil...

It seems that mathematical ideas are arranged somehow in strata, the ideas in each stratum being lin...

Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; an...

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical id...

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of poems. If his patterns are more permanent t...

In these days of conflict between ancient and modern studies, there must surely be something to be s...

It (proof by contradiction) is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer th...

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. It is ...

The play is independent of the pages on which it is printed, and ‘pure geometries’ are independent o...

The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful—‘important’ if you like, but the word is very a...

...317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than a...

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.