“In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.”

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.

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.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it.

We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?

The most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution.

Love was the most savage monster of all.

Nobody fights you like your own sister; nobody else knows the most vulnerable parts of you and will aim for them without mercy.

Of all the hokum with which this country [America] is riddled, the most odd is the common notion that it is free of class distinctions.

For musicians, Musikfest is the most cool event.