Top 70 G.H. Hardy Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It is not worth an intelligent man’s time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.”

— G.H. Hardy

2. “Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”

— G.H. Hardy

3. “A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.”

— G.H. Hardy

4. “I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.”

— G.H. Hardy

5. “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

6. “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.”

— G.H. Hardy

7. “A chess problem is an exercise in pure mathematics.”

— G.H. Hardy

8. “A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.”

— G.H. Hardy

9. “Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.”

— G.H. Hardy

10. “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.”

— G.H. Hardy

11. “For any serious purpose, intelligence is a very minor gift.”

— G.H. Hardy

12. “Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject.”

— G.H. Hardy

13. “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

14. “If a man has any genuine talent he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.”

— G.H. Hardy

15. “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

16. “A person’s first duty, a young person’s at any rate, is to be ambitious, and the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind something of permanent value.”

— G.H. Hardy

17. “Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.”

— G.H. Hardy

18. “If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gratifying them than a mathematician.”

— G.H. Hardy

19. “The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.”

— G.H. Hardy

20. “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.”

— G.H. Hardy

21. “Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.”

— G.H. Hardy

22. “The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid’s theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.”

— G.H. Hardy

23. “Most people can do nothing at all well.”

— G.H. Hardy

24. “There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain.”

— G.H. Hardy

25. “It is 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 seems almost to vary inversely to its reputed utility.”

— G.H. Hardy

26. “The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.”

— G.H. Hardy

27. “The seriousness of a theorem, of course, does not lie in its consequences, which are merely the evidence for its seriousness.”

— G.H. Hardy

28. “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.”

— G.H. Hardy

29. “The Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations have perished; Hammurabi, Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar are empty names; yet Babylonian mathematics is still interesting, and the Babylonian scale of 60 is still used in Astronomy.”

— G.H. Hardy

30. “I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among “real” mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as “useless” as the theory of numbers.”

— G.H. Hardy

31. “All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.”

— G.H. Hardy

32. “Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and ten of your own.”

— G.H. Hardy

33. “For my part, it is difficult for me to say what I owe to Ramanujan – his originality has been a constant source of suggestion to me ever since I knew him, and his death is one of the worst blows I have ever had.”

— G.H. Hardy

34. “Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.”

— G.H. Hardy

35. “Ambition is a noble passion which may legitimately take many forms; there was something noble in the ambitions of Attila or Napoleon; but the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind something of permanent value.”

— G.H. Hardy

36. “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.”

— G.H. Hardy

37. “Mathematics may, like poetry or music, “promote and sustain a lofty habit of mind.””

— G.H. Hardy

38. “A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.”

— G.H. Hardy

39. “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.”

— G.H. Hardy

40. “As history proves abundantly, mathematical achievement, whatever its intrinsic worth, is the most enduring of all.”

— G.H. Hardy

41. “The beauty of a mathematical theorem depends a great deal on its seriousness, as even in poetry the beauty of a line may depend to some extent on the significance of the ideas which it contains.”

— G.H. Hardy

42. “No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years.”

— G.H. Hardy

43. “The theory of numbers, more than any other branch of mathematics, began by being an experimental science. Its most famous theorems have all been conjectured, sometimes a hundred years or more before they were proved; and they have been suggested by the evidence of a mass of computations.”

— G.H. Hardy

44. “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.”

— G.H. Hardy

45. “Good work is not done by ‘humble’ men.”

— G.H. Hardy

46. “Bradman is a whole class above any batsman who has ever lived: if Archimedes, Newton and Gauss remain in the Hobbs class, I have to admit the possibility of a class above them, which I find difficult to imagine. They had better be moved from now on into the Bradman class.”

— G.H. Hardy

47. “Most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity.”

— G.H. Hardy

48. “A man’s first duty, a young man’s at any rate, is to be ambitious. Ambition is a noble passion which may legitimately take many forms but the noblest ambition is that of leaving behind one something of permanent value.”

— G.H. Hardy

49. “We have concluded that the trivial mathematics is, on the whole, useful, and that the real mathematics, on the whole, is not.”

— G.H. Hardy

50. “Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.”

— G.H. Hardy