"There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

"In short, our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up, causing him to lose his mind."

"The man who lives in division is living in death. He cannot find himself because he is lost; he has ceased to be a reality. The person he believes himself to be is a bad dream."

"‘Tis true, with other men their path he walk’d,
And like the rest in seeming did and talk’d,
Nor outraged Reason’s rules by flaw nor start,
His madness was not of the head, but heart."

"Why has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living—because cognition gives them more than they can carry?"

"I suffer from a frightful disease of the mind. My thought abandons me at all stages. From the simple act of thinking to the external act of its materialization in words. Words, forms of phrases, inner directions of thinking, simple reactions of the mind—I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Hence, whenever I can seize upon a form, however imperfect it may be, I hold it fast, lest I lost the entire thought. I am beneath myself, I know it, it makes me suffer, but I accept the fact in the fear of not dying entirely."

"It occurred to me that if I were really losing my mind, I might end by murdering somebody."

"Love that is not madness is not love."

"Dostoyevsky used to watch his wife shit. He would take notes on her facial expressions."

"But what was this world created for?”
“To drive us mad."

"Men have called me mad; but the question is not settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest of intelligence."

"No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness."

"I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right."