There is something else, though, at which he was clearly superior to Einstein or Rutherford or any other great genius: and that is at turning any work of the intellect, major or minor or sheer play, into a work of art. It was that gift above all, I think, which made him, almost without realizing it, purvey such intellectual delight.

I said that a mathematician was a maker of patterns of ideas, and that beauty and seriousness were the criteria by which his patterns should be judged.

high thinking of one kind is always likely to affect high thinking of another

Now Flowers was a decent enough fellow (so far as ‘Alan St Aubyn’ could draw one), but even my unsophisticated mind refused to accept him as clever. If he could do these things, why not I?

The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematician

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

We must guard against a fallacy common among apologists of science, the fallacy of supposing that the men whose work most benefits humanity are thinking much of that while they do it,

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

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