“… it is true that a mathematician who is not somewhat of a poet, will never be a perfect mathematician.”

“A mathematician is only perfect insofar as he is a perfect man, sensitive to the beauty of truth.”

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”

“A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.”

“Who has studied the works of such men as Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, Riemann, Sophus Lie, and Weierstrass, can doubt that a great mathematician is a great artist? The faculties possessed by such men, varying greatly in kind and degree with the individual, are analogous with those requisite for constructive art. Not every mathematician possesses in a specially high degree that critical faculty which finds its employment in the perfection of form, in conformity with the ideal of logical completeness; but every great mathematician possesses the rarer faculty of constructive imagination.”

“The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureat.”

“The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”

“Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?”

“God is the perfect poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations.”

“God is the perfect poet.”