The first test of potential in mathematics is whether you can get anything out of geometry.

- John Edensor Littlewood

I read in the proof sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: "As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends." My reaction was, …

- John Edensor Littlewood

The infinitely competent can be uncreative.

- John Edensor Littlewood

Try a hard problem. You may not solve it, but you will prove something else.

- John Edensor Littlewood

I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

- John Edensor Littlewood

In passing, I firmly believe that research should be offset by a certain amount of teaching, if only as a change from the agony of research. The trou…

- John Edensor Littlewood

It is true that I should have been surprised in the past to learn that Professor Hardy had joined the Oxford Group. But one could not say the adverse…

- John Edensor Littlewood

I constantly meet people who are doubtful, generally without due reason, about their potential capacity [as mathematicians]. The first test is whethe…

- John Edensor Littlewood

A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

- John Edensor Littlewood