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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.

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
Proper
Subject
Subjects
Astonishingly
Philosophy
Hopelessly
Hand
Elementary
Knowledge
Counts
Hands
Obscure
Hardly

More quotes by G. H. Hardy

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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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Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Perhaps five or even ten per cent of men can do something rather well. It is a tiny minority who can do anything really well, and the number of men who can do two things well is negligible. If a man has any genuine talent, he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.
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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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No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game
G. H. Hardy
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A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
G. H. Hardy
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Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
G. H. Hardy
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A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.
G. H. Hardy
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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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The seriousness of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects.
G. H. Hardy
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A chess problem is simply an exercise in pure mathematics.
G. H. Hardy
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The case for my life... is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more
G. H. Hardy
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Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. Immortality may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
G. H. Hardy
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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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The fact is there are few more popular subjects than mathematics. Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune.
G. H. Hardy