The case for my life... is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more

I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.

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

Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: "Yes, up to isomorphism".

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

No mathematician should ever allow him to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game. ... Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty. There have been men who have done great work later; ... [but] I do not know of a single instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty. ... A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.

Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets