"Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor on Action
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"It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night."

Nietzsche, Friedrich on Suicide
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"At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death."

Pavese, Cesare on Suicide
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"If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will."

Artaud, Antonin on Suicide
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"Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character. So, melancholy is morbid only when it occupies too much place in life; but it is equally morbid for it to be wholly excluded from life."

Durkheim, Emile on Sadness
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"Melancholy men are of all others the most witty."

Aristotle on Wit
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"Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits."

Sontag, Susan on Depression
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"Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. Patriotism is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by patriotism I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one's own nation, which is the concern with the nation's spiritual as much as with its material welfare --never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one's country which is not part of one's love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship."

Fromm, Erich on Patriotism
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"The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds."

Jampolsky, Gerald G. on Belief
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"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."

Adams, John on Democracy
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"However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance -- so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature."

Greene, Graham on Suicide
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"Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor on Sarcasm
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"Realists do not fear the results of their study."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor on Reality
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"If there is no God, everything is permitted."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor on Atheism
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"You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor on Memory
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"Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor on Lies and Lying
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"If you like a man's laugh before you know anything of him, you may say with confidence that he is a good man."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor on Laughter
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"Neither man or nation can exist without a sublime idea."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor on Ideas
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"My thinking tends to be libertarian. That is, I oppose intrusions of the state into the private realm -- as in abortion, sodomy, prostitution, pornography, drug use, or suicide, all of which I would strongly defend as matters of free choice in a representative democracy."

Paglia, Camille on Anarchism
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"I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat."

Artaud, Antonin on Psychiatry
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"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."

Poe, Edgar Allan on Insanity
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"In each age men of genius undertake the ascent. From below, the world follows them with their eyes. These men go up the mountain, enter the clouds, disappear, reappear, People watch them, mark them. They walk by the side of precipices. They daringly pursue their road. See them aloft, see them in the distance; they are but black specks. On they go. The road is uneven, its difficulties constant. At each step a wall, at each step a trap. As they rise the cold increases. They must make their ladder, cut the ice and walk on it., hewing the steps in haste. A storm is raging. Nevertheless they go forward in their madness. The air becomes difficult to breath. The abyss yawns below them. Some fall. Others stop and retrace their steps; there is a sad weariness. The bold ones continue. They are eyed by the eagles; the lightning plays about them: the hurricane is furious. No matter, they persevere."

Hugo, Victor on Obstacles
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"No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness."

Aristotle on Madness
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"Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence."

Tikkanen, Henrik on Intelligence and Intellectuals
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"What is madness but nobility of soul. At odds with circumstance?"

Roethke, Theodore on Insanity
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"Whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad."

Proverb on Insanity
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This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone."

Gracian, Baltasar on Insanity
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"We are all born mad. Some remain so."

Beckett, Samuel on Insanity
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"There is no great genius without a mixture of madness."

Aristotle on Genius
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"Much Madness is divinest Sense -- to a discerning Eye -- much Sense -- the starkest Madness --"

Dickinson, Emily on Madness
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"In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!"

Ballard, J. G. on Madness
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"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."

Huxley, Aldous on Truth
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"And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths."

Artaud, Antonin on Madness
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"Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd."

Sitwell, Dame Edith on Eccentricity
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"Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?"

Duncan, Isadora on Madness
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"Man is stark mad; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens."

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De on Humankind
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"Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor on Work
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"We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!"

Shaw, George Bernard on Madness
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"Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide."

Dryden, John on Genius
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"The extreme limit of wisdom --that's what the public calls madness."

Cocteau, Jean on Wisdom
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