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 the number seemed ….

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

Good work is not done by 'humble' men.

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

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

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..

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art..

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

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

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

When the world is mad, a mathematician may find in mathematics an incomparable anodyne. For mathematics is, of all the arts and sciences, the most au….

Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics..

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

The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words must fit together in a har….

I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least differen….

I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which ….

Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immortality" may be a silly word, bu….

Perhaps five or even ten per cent of men can do something rather well. It is a tiny minority who can do anything really well, and the number of men w….

A person’s first duty, a young person’s at any rate, is to be ambitious, and the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind something of permanent va….

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

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