Most people can do nothing at all well

The creative life was the only one for a serious man.

A month's intelligent instruction in the theory of numbes ought to be twice as instructive, twice as useful, and at least 10 times as entertaining as the same amount of 'calculus for engineers'.

No one should ever be bored. … One can be horrified, or disgusted, but one can’t be bored.

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

Good work is not done by 'humble' men

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 to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways."