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

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain.

Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.

Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

I propose to put forward an apology for mathematics; and I may be told that it needs none, since there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy.

Most people can do nothing at all well