A Person’s First Duty, A Young Person’s

A Mathematician ... Has No Material To Work With But Ideas, And So His Patterns Are Likely To Last Longer, Since Ideas Wear Less With Time Than Words.

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.

The Mathematician Is In Much More Direct Contact With Reality. ... [whereas] The Physicist's Reality, Whatever It May Be, Has Few Or None Of The Attributes Which Common Sense Ascribes Instinctively To Reality. A Chair May Be A Collection Of Whirling Electrons.

The Study Of Mathematics Is, If An Unprofitable, A Perfectly Harmless And Innocent Occupation.

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.