Ambition Quote by G. H. Hardy

A typical mathematician does not actively try to be useful. Individual mathematicians are motivated primarily by a subtle mixture of ambition and intellectual curiosity,…

— Timothy Gowers

The life of a mathematician is dominated by an insatiable curiosity, a desire bordering on passion to solve the problems he is studying.

— Jean Dieudonne

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.

— Francis Crick

A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is…

— Gian-Carlo Rota

The mathematician requires tact and good taste at every step of his work, and he has to learn to trust to his own instinct…

— James Whitbread Lee Glaisher

Mathematicians boast of their exacting achievements, but in reality they are absorbed in mental acrobatics and contribute nothing to society.

— Ogyu Sorai

Are not most professional mathematicians spared all trouble incident to income?

— Tobias Dantzig

Mathematicians - for what they do - are really poorly rewarded. And it's a very competitive field, almost as bad as being a concert…

— Gian-Carlo Rota

The desire to explore thus marks out the mathematician. This is one of the forces making for the growth of mathematics. The mathematician enjoys…

— W. W. Sawyer

The whole thing that makes a mathematician’s life worthwhile is that he gets the grudging admiration of three or four colleagues.

— Donald Knuth

The best person able to appraise promise as a mathematician is a gifted teacher, and not a professional tester.

— Joel Henry Hildebrand

Outside observers often assume that the more complicted a piece of mathematics is, the more mathematicians admire it. Nothing could be further from the…

— Keith Devlin