No One Should Ever Be Bored. …

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.

It Is A Melancholy Experience For A Professional Mathematician To Find Himself Writing About Mathematics. The Function Of A Mathematician Is To Do Something, To Prove New Theorems, To Add To Mathematics, And Not To Talk About What He Or Other Mathematicians Have Done. Statesmen Despise Publicists, Painters Despise Art-critics, And Physiologists, Physicists, Or Mathematicians Have Usually Similar Feelings: There Is No Scorn More Profound, Or On The Whole More Justifiable, Than That Of The Men Who Make For The Men Who Explain. Exposition, Criticism, Appreciation, Is Work For Second-rate Minds.

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.

The Creative Life Was The Only One For A Serious Man.

The Public Does Not Need To Be Convinced That There Is Something In Mathematics.