The German great genius Friedrich Nietzsche who, in 1889, after famously declaring, in 1882, that “God is dead”, epitomizing the emerging view that the Christian God was no longer a viable source of any absolute moral principles, supposedly, went insane (Ѻ) (Ѻ), dying (dereacting) the year after. (Ѻ) |
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”— Friedrich Nietzsche (c.1885)
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”— Friedrich Nietzsche (c.1885)
“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”— Friedrich Nietzsche (c.1885)
In 1850, German physician-physicist Robert Mayer, after discovering that James Joule had claimed discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat, while his work was still unknown, jumped out of a third-story window, and was later put in an insane asylum. |
“I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you're presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There's a very close analogue there.”— Robert Pirsig (1974), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (§14) (Ѻ)
“Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.”— Robert Pirsig (1991), Lila: an Inquiry Into Morals (Ѻ)
“When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”— Robert Pirsig (1991), Lila: Inquiry into Morals; cited in The God Delusion (pg. 28) by Richard Dawkins
“There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.”— Aristotle (c.310BC)
“There is no great genius without a touch of madness.”— Seneca the Younger (c.50AD) (Ѻ), likely Aristotle paraphrase
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”— Johann Goethe (c.1800)
“Emptiest word rubbish and silliest gallimathias that have ever been heard outside the insane asylum.”— Arthur Schopenhauer (1839), commentary on the writings of Georg Hegel [1]
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible insanity.”— Edgar Poe (c.1845)
“Men have called me mad; but the question is not settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest of intelligence.”— Edgar Poe (c.1845)
“For over two thousand years some subtle relationship has been thought to exist between genius and insanity.”— Bernard Hollander (1921), preface to John Nisbet’s The Insanity of Genius [2]
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”— Albert Einstein (c.1930)
“Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.”— E.B. White (c.1950) (Ѻ)
“The sign of a half-baked speculator in the social sciences is his search for something in the social system that corresponds to the physicist's notion of entropy.”— Paul Samuelson (1972) [3]