“In a dream it’s typical not to be rational.”

I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia.

I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life.

To some extent, people who are insane are nonconformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives.

However I am still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation my situation may be atypical.

There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.

Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.

Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation.

Though I had success in my research both when I was mad and when I was not, eventually I felt that my work would be better respected if I thought and acted like a ‘normal’ person.

Statistically, it would seem improbable that any mathematician or scientist, at the age of 66, would be able through continued research efforts, to add much to his or her previous achievements.

Nowadays we can do computer experiments using Mathematica, and even solve a system of 42 equations. This offers another route to knowledge, rather than mere ideas.

The man who owns up to arthritis in a beri-beri year is as lonely as a woman in a last month’s dress.

But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition… Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.

I would become a therapist and a leader in terms of mental illness. But I’m not in the position.

As you will find in multivariable calculus, there is often a number of solutions for any given problem.

People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering.

This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.

Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.

When a planner speaks of implementing goals rationally.

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

Man has a tendency to try to give clear reasons to be rational, but often you can see how all those reasons are not convincing and turn out to be a big nonsense.

If you’re rational and logical, they argue their case rationally and logically. If you’re loyal and faithful, they turn those against you.

For me, a totalitarian parody of a would-be rational learning process.

It demanded a new rationale for belief.

The human race will then become one family, and the world will be the dwelling of Rational Men.