A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

As history proves abundantly, mathematical achievement, whatever its intrinsic worth, is the most enduring of all.

[I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant.

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

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

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.

Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.