G.H. Hardy quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by G.H. Hardy

G.H. Hardy Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from G.H. Hardy on Wise Famous Quotes.

The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.

Philosophy proper is a subject, on the one hand so hopelessly obscure, on the other so astonishingly elementary, that there knowledge hardly counts.

A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.

Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: "Yes, up to isomorphism".

Most people can do nothing at all well

Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.

All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.

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

For any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift.

Good work is not done by 'humble' men

As Littlewood said to me once [of the ancient Greeks], they are not clever school boys or 'scholarship candidates,' but 'Fellows of another college.

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

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.

There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain.

Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets

I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.

The case for my life ... is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty

Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and ten of your own.

Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.

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.

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

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

The creative life [is] the only one for a serious man.

The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.

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.

A chess problem is an exercise in pure mathematics.

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

In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.

As history proves abundantly, mathematical achievement, whatever its intrinsic worth, is the most enduring of all.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.

No one should ever be bored. ... One can be horrified, or disgusted, but one can't be bored.

Mathematics may, like poetry or music, "promote and sustain a lofty habit of mind."