G. H. Hardy Quotes

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.

Just because I try to read a lot of stuff doesn't mean I can fully conceptualize all of these intense, big, abstract ideas.

One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren't usually interested in application, because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It's structures and patterns, and that's what we love, and that's what we get off on.

Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth.

It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

The truth is, the less a subject had to do with the visible world, the more talented I was at solving problems.

The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to use all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment.

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought , for one would thereby dispense with man himself.

The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought.

I think part of the appeal of mathematical logic is that the formulas look mysterious - You write backward Es!

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.

You have something that exists in your head, and getting that abstract thought from your head into something that actually exists is a difficult process.

The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.

Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.

I guess my experience with some stuff is kind of abstract.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

I've learnt over the years to always be thinking of titles and ideas that I try to put across with just a couple of words. It's the difficult part when you're writing things that are basically abstract.

I think what really stays with me is the idea that you can write music about the texture of a wall, and everything is in some way connected.

The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.