G. H. Hardy

A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas…

— G. H. Hardy

What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence; and to have produced anything of the slightest…

— G. H. Hardy

A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or…

— G. H. Hardy

No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely…

— G. H. Hardy

A chess problem is simply an exercise in pure mathematics.

— G. H. Hardy

I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity…

— G. H. Hardy

“What is the proper justification of a mathematician’s life? My answers will be, for the most part, such as are expected from…

— G. H. Hardy

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

— G. H. Hardy

The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. ... [Whereas] the physicist's reality, whatever it may be, has few or…

— G. H. Hardy

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

— G. H. Hardy

Bradman is a whole class above any batsman who has ever lived: if Archimedes, Newton and Gauss remain in the Hobbs class,…

— G. H. Hardy

The Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations have perished; Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar are empty names; yet Babylonian mathematics is still interesting, and the…

— G. H. Hardy

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

— G. H. Hardy

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

— G. H. Hardy

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

— G. H. Hardy

I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of…

— G. H. Hardy

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

— G. H. Hardy

Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject; no one can draw much consolation from it when he has lost the…

— G. H. Hardy

I am obliged to interpolate some remarks on a very difficult subject: proof and its importance in mathematics. All physicists, and a…

— G. H. Hardy

The theory of numbers, more than any other branch of mathematics, began by being an experimental science. Its most famous theorems have…

— G. H. Hardy

If I could prove by logic that you would die in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die,…

— G. H. Hardy

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

— G. H. Hardy

“Imaginary’ universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed ‘real’ one; and most of the finest products of an applied…

— G. H. Hardy

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

— G. H. Hardy

A chess problem is genuine mathematics, but it is in some way "trivial" mathematics. However, ingenious and intricate, however original and surprising…

— G. H. Hardy