Best G. H. Hardy Quotes
- For any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift. Any
- What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence; and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether… Beyond
- Most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity. Exaggerate
- It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to… Add
- Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and ten of your own. Cricket
- I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty Advance
- No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game Allow
- Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets Bayonets
- The case for my life... is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more Add
- Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject; no one can draw much consolation from it when he has lost the power or the… Apt
- I remember once going to see him [Ramanujan] when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No. 1729, and remarked that… Cab
- If I could prove by logic that you would die in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but my sorrow… Die
- A chess problem is an exercise in pure mathematics. Chess
- Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how. Difficult
- I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics,… Achievement
- If a man is in any sense a real mathematician, then it is a hundred to one that his mathematics will be far better than… Age
- Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. Appreciation
- It is rather astonishing how little practical value scientific knowledge has for ordinary men, how dull and commonplace such of it as has value is,… Astonishing
- A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with… Ideas
- I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of… Any
- The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. ... [Whereas] the physicist's reality, whatever it may be, has few or none of the… Ascribes
- [I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration… Advised
- I propose to put forward an apology for mathematics; and I may be told that it needs none, since there are now few studies more… Apology
- Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject. Contemplative
- Mathematics may, like poetry or music, "promote and sustain a lofty habit of mind." Habit