“I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.”

It’s better to be dead, or even perfectly well, than to suffer from the wrong affliction.

I later spent… five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release.

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

I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house.

Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos.

I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton.

I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health.

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.

Man, one may say, was never in such a completely animal condition; but he has, on the other hand, never escaped from it.

We’re never going to escape the idea of being young. Which I don’t mind myself. I mean, who wants to grow up anyway?

But the power of destiny is something awesome; neither wealth, nor Ares, nor a tower, nor dark-hulled ships might escape it.

Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.

It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one’s generation.

I cannot escape the objection that there is no state of mind, however simple, that does not change every moment.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.