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

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

Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.

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

I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty

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.

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