A Mathematician's Apology (Canto Classics)

there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.

There are many highly respectable motives which may lead men to prosecute research, but three which are much more important than the rest. The first (without which the rest must come to nothing) is intellectual curiosity, desire to know the truth. Then, professional pride, anxiety to be satisfied with one’s performance, the shame that overcomes any

Henry James’s notebooks,

The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

For my own part I have never once found myself in a position where such scientific knowledge as I possess, outside pure mathematics, has brought me the slightest advantage. It is indeed rather astonishing how little practical value scientific knowledge has for ordinary men, how dull and commonplace such of it as has value is, and how its value seem

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

Their answers, if they are honest, will usually take one or other of two forms; and the second form is merely a humbler variation of the first, which is the only answer which we need consider seriously. (I) ‘I do what I do because it is the one and only thing that I can do at all well.

His inner life was his own, and very rich. The sadness came at the end. Apart from his devoted sister, he was left with no one close to him.

Then, from about nine to one, unless he was giving a lecture, he worked at his own mathematics. Four hours creative work a day is about the limit for a mathematician, he used to say.