Quotes from John Edensor Littlewood

Before creation, God did just pure mathematics. Then He thought it would be a pleasant change to do some applied.

A linguist would be shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is open, or again that "E is dense in E" does not mean the same thing as "E is dense in itself".

The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it would.

I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.