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A science or an art may be said to be useful if its development increases, even indirectly, the material well-being and comfort of men, it promotes happiness, using that word in a crude and commonplace way.

G. H. Hardy

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G. H. Hardy
Age: 70 †
Born: 1877
Born: February 7
Died: 1947
Died: December 1
Academic
Mathematician
University Teacher
Cranleigh
Surrey
G. H. Hardy
Godfrey Harold Hardy
Godfrey·Harold·Hardy
Godfrey Harold
Way
Word
Increases
Men
Happiness
Useful
Science
Using
Art
Material
May
Increase
Indirectly
Wells
Materials
Promotes
Well
Comfort
Crude
Even
Development
Commonplace

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Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and ten of your own.
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Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: Yes, up to isomorphism.
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I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our creations, are simply the notes of our observations.
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There is always more in one of Ramanujan's formulae than meets the eye, as anyone who sets to work to verify those which look the easiest will soon discover. In some the interest lies very deep, in others comparatively near the surface but there is not one which is not curious and entertaining.
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It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
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If I could prove by logic that you would die in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but my sorrow would be very much mitigated by pleasure in the proof.
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I wrote a great deal during the next ten [early] years,but very little of any importance there are not more than four or five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.
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No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game
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Good work is not done by 'humble' men
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The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
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The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
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Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets
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I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty
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In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.
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I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
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What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men.
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317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.
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As Littlewood said to me once [of the ancient Greeks], they are not clever school boys or scholarship candidates, but Fellows of another college.
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... Philosophy proper is a subject, on the one hand so hopelessly obscure, on the other so astonishingly elementary, that there knowledge hardly counts.
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Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.
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