Quotes from G.H. Hardy

No one should ever be bored. One can be horrified, or disgusted, but one can't be bored.

If I had a statue on a column in London, would I prefer the columns to be so high that the statue was invisible, or low enough for the features to be recognizable? I would choose the first alternative, Dr Snow, presumably, the second.

The play is independent of the pages on which it is printed, and 'pure geometries' are independent of lecture rooms, or of any other detail of the physical world.

The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done.

a science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life...

will end with a summary of my conclusions, but putting them in a more personal way. I said at the beginning that anyone who defends his subject will find that he is defending himself;

A man who is always asking 'Is what I do worthwhile?' and 'Am I the right person to do it?' will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others.

Even a pure mathematician may find his appreciation of this geometry [applied geometry] quickened, since there is no mathematician so pure that he feels no interest at all in the physical world; but, in so far as he succumbs to this temptation, he will be abandoning his purely mathematical position.

Matemati?in çok küçük bölümü pratik yarar sa?lar; o küçük bölüm de oldukça s?k?c?d?r.

OLD BRANDY came to mean a taste that was eccentric, esoteric, but just within the bounds of reason.

Matematiksel sonuçlar, içerdikleri de?erler ne olursa olsun, di?erlerinin içinde en kal?c? olanlard?r.

We do not want many 'variations' in the proof of a mathematical theorem: 'enumeration of cases', indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument. A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.

he had made such and such a move, then I had such and such a winning combination in mind.' But the 'great game' of chess is primarily psychological, a conflict between one trained intelligence and another, and not a mere collection of small mathematical theorems.

Good work is no done by 'humble' men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking 'Is what I do worth while?' and 'Am I the right person to do it?' will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others.

It seems that mathematical ideas are arranged somehow in strata, the ideas in each stratum being linked by a complex of relations both among themselves and with those above and below. The lower the stratum, the deeper (and in general more difficult) the idea. Thus the idea of an 'irrational' is deeper than that of an integer; and Pythagoras's theorem is, for that reason, deeper than Euclid's.

In these days of conflict between ancient and modern studies, there must surely be something to be said for a study which did not begin with Pythagoras, and will not end with Einstein, but is the oldest and the youngest of all.