“Music and Dancing, not only give great pleasure but have the honour of depending on Mathematics, for they consist in number and in measure.....Therefore, whatever the old doctors may say, to employ oneself at all this is to be a Philosopher and a Mathematician.”

“My dear, you are a mathematician. You're even more, you're a philosopher of mathematics. So do this for me: Tell me the final number.”

“The Greeks were the first mathematicians who are still ‘real’ to us to-day. Oriental mathematics may be an interesting curiosity, but Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand: as Littlewood said to me once, they are not clever schoolboys or ‘scholarship candidates’, but ‘Fellows of another college’. So Greek mathematics is ‘permanent’, more permanent even than Greek literature. 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.”

“Therefore he who would administer the kingdom, honouring it as he honours his own person, may be employed to govern it, and he who would administer it with the love which he bears to his own person may be entrusted with it.”

“Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.”

“Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.”