The Case For My Life... Is This:

Archimedes Will Be Remembered When Aeschylus Is Forgotten, Because Languages Die And Mathematical Ideas Do Not. "immortality" May Be A Silly Word, But Probably A Mathematician Has The Best Chance Of Whatever It May Mean.

It Is Not Worth An Intelligent Man's Time To Be In The Majority. By Definition, There Are Already Enough People To Do That.

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.

I Was At My Best At A Little Past Forty, When I Was A Professor At Oxford.

Young Men Should Prove Theorems, Old Men Should Write Books.