Good work is not done by 'humble' men

No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game

As Littlewood said to me once [of the ancient Greeks], they are not clever school boys or "scholarship candidates," but "Fellows of another college."

No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.

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, and how its value seems almost to vary inversely to its reputed utility.

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

The "seriousness" of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects.