19 Quotes by John Edensor Littlewood

Either work all out or rest completely. It is too easy, when rather tired, to fritter a whole day away with the intention of working but never getting properly down to it. This is pure waste, nothing is done, and you have had no rest or relaxation.

Try a hard problem. You may not solve it, but you will prove something else.

Before creation, God did just pure mathematics. Then He thought it would be a pleasant change to do some applied.

Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad.

I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

The first test of potential in mathematics is whether you can get anything out of geometry.

The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it would.

A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

A linguist would be shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is open, or again that “E is dense in E” does not mean the same thing as “E is dense in itself”.