“Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles.”

“Mathematics doesn’t care about those beyond the numbers.”

“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.”

“The more they measure, the more they realize how much the Greeks departed from regular and banal lines in order to produce their effect.”

“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”

“Something has got to hold it together. I'm saying my prayers to Elmer, the Greek god of glue.”