Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
Good work is not done by 'humble' men
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.
All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.
I remember once going to see him [Ramanujan] when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi-cab No. 1729, and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways. "
It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. . . Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value.
There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.
When you hear the voice of Rosa Ponselle, you hear a fountain of melody blessed by the Lord.
The Greeks bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language--the word 'enthusiasm'--en theos--a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.
The marvelous thing about a joke with a double meaning is that it can only mean one thing.