Mathematical Madness Quotes

To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"
"I suppose so," said Alice
"Well, then," the Cat went on, "you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."
"I call it purring, not growling," said Alice.
"Call it what you like," said the Cat. ~ Lewis Carroll

Every science that has thriven has thriven upon its own symbols: logic, the only science which is admitted to have made no improvements in century after century, is the only one which has grown no symbols. ~ Augustus De Morgan

We are creatures of rage and madness and bitter tears and we knew that from the start. Our end was disaster and we knew that from the start. We knew it all from the start. ~ Thomas Curtis Clark

It is their nature, beautiful and simple. That you would destroy such beings, Mr. Lincoln, such superior creatures, seems madness to me."
"That you speak of them with such reverence, Mr. Poe, seems madness to me."
"Can you imagine it? Can you imagine seeing the universe through such eyes? Laughing in the face of time and death - the world your Garden of Eden? Your library? Your harem? ~ Seth Grahame-Smith

He was a young man of savage & unexpected originality, a diseased genius & quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane & in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness of a man of genius some genius often remains: the form & not the quality of intelligence has been affected; the fruit has been bruised in the fall, but has preserved all its perfume & all the savor of its pulp, hardly too ripe. ~ Remy De Gourmont

Logic is invincible, because in order to combat logic it is necessary to use logic. ~ Pierre Boutroux

Evelyn said, "What's it called when a person needs a ... person ... when you want to be touched and the ... two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?"
Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. "Love," she said at length. She swallowed. "It's a madness. It's bad. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

Music is a savage art, a measured madness. ~ Edward Abbey

[Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same. ~ Ernest Becker

Writing sustains me. But wouldn't it be better to say it sustains this kind of life? Which doesn't mean life is any better when I don't write. On the contrary, it is far worse, wholly unbearable, and inevitably ends in madness. This is, of course, only on the assumption that I am a writer even when I don't write - which is indeed the case; and a non-writing writer is, in fact, a monster courting insanity. ~ Franz Kafka

You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Women tended to be more docile and patient, so went the belief, and could be depended upon more than men to check and recheck the accuracy of their calculations. A typical picture of the Galton Biometrical Laboratory under Karl Pearson would have Pearson and several men walking around, looking at output from the computers or discussing deep mathematical ideas, while all about them rows of women were computing. ~ David Salsburg

So the bottom line is that if you believe in an external reality independent of humans, then you must also believe that our physical reality is a mathematical structure. Nothing else has a baggage-free description. In other words, we all live in a gigantic mathematical object-one that's more elaborate than a dodecahedron, and probably also more complex than objects with intimidating names such as Calabi-Yau manifolds, tensor bundles and Hilbert spaces, which appear in today's most advanced physics theories. Everything in our world is purely mathematical-including you. ~ Max Tegmark

Underwater madness slipping into a haze, drowning and choking in repugnant nostalgic thoughts. ~ Karen Quan

I know, indeed, and can conceive of no pursuit so antagonistic to the cultivation of the oratorical faculty ... as the study of Mathematics. An eloquent mathematician must, from the nature of things, ever remain as rare a phenomenon as a talking fish, and it is certain that the more anyone gives himself up to the study of oratorical effect the less will he find himself in a fit state to mathematicize. ~ James Joseph Sylvester

But to believe that getting stuff is the purpose and aim of life is madness. ~ Hubert Selby, Jr.

Remembering ... that Eratosthenes of Cyrene, employing mathematical theories and geometrical methods, discovered from the course of the sun, the shadows cast by an equinoctial gnomon, and the inclination of the heaven that the circumference of the earth is two hundred and fifty-two thousand stadia, that is, thirty-one million five hundred thousand paces. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. ~ Paul A.M. Dirac

That's what separates the sane from the not: knowing madness is an option but declining to choose it. ~ Stephanie Wrobel

If there is anything that can bind the mind of man to this dreary exile of our earthly home and can reconcile us with our fate so that one can enjoy living, - then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy. ~ Johannes Kepler

I don't kill people.
Perhaps it's just another inhibition to do away with it. Perhaps not. There's really no way of telling. It's possible I've just never been able to well up enough interest in any person to care long enough to end their life. I'd much rather avoid them altogether. Most of them. It's 4 A.M. and the sky is beautiful up and away from this room and this bed and the oppressive inevitability of sleep. I HATE SLEEP. But sleep always comes (that, or madness). ~ Jhonen Vasquez

Danäe believed not a wisp or whiff of the forerunner's history, whose fame was incanted in his name, Andracos Dranias, and his sensuously pallid wife, Oleandra, her ophidian slither of a walk, the records indicated, likened to a seductive serpent, her long tinseled curls to a she-devil's madness, and her scent to paralytic potions. ~ F Voutsakis

I shudder to tell that many of our people, harassed by the madness of excessive hunger, cut pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens already dead there, which they cooked, but when it was not yet roasted enough by the fire, they devoured it with savage mouth ~ Edward M. Peters

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

It was a long winter of deep snow, solitude, and madness. The satellite kept feeding me digital news of summer in other places. I had to come down from the White Mountain, down into the valley where flowers bloomed, where trees grew new leaves, and hot pants were on! ~ Robert Earl Wildwood

where madness and charm coexist, wine is never far away. ~ Michael Karam

And men, whose reason long was blind, From cells of madness unconfined, Oft lose whole years of darker mind. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

When, President Obama, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end to that unbridled audacity of yours swaggering about as it does now? ~ Ted Cruz

Elm

BY SYLVIA PLATH

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feather ~ Sylvia Plath

In a world muddled with madness, I made a conscious effort to stay sane. ~ Angela Colleen Prendergast

It took me 1057 pages to describe the hundreds of mathematical equations, algorithms and programming techniques that I invented and used. ~ Philip Emeagwali

The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand miles away. At best, a man suffered from strange lapses in judgment and perception, finding himself at the mirror about to comb his hair with a mechanical pencil, stepping into his undershirt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea. Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first glimpse of a pale hem of sunlight on the horizon in mid-September. But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their own melancholy that they were lost forever. And few among the wives and families of the men who returned from a winter on the Ice would have said what they got back was identical to what they had sent down there. ~ Michael Chabon

The blaze from the trees spreads to tablecloths and crepe paper - a chain reaction so brilliantly spectacular and terrible, I ache to be a part of it ... to devour and destroy,then relish in the plunder.
I could do it.I could stand here amid the flames,let them lap at my skin,and laugh in a death-defying haze - because they belong to me. I could watch the world crumble and then dance,triumphant,in the snowfall of ash left behind.
All I have to do is set the power free. Escape the chains of my humanity,let madness be my guide. ~ A.G. Howard

With madness, as with vomit, it's the passerby who receives the inconvenience. ~ Joe Orton

When you commune with your ever-present inner calm, you are released from the madness and pain of all outer turmoil. ~ Bryant McGill

The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought. ~ Kenneth E. Iverson

I walked into my own book, seeking peace.
It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness. ~ Anais Nin

As human beings we're living in a reality of industrial madness. ~ John Trudell

Tamas had heard that every genius was equal parts madness. He ~ Brian McClellan

How obvious, now, was that mathematical ratio of its sides, the quadratic sequence 1:4:9! And how naive to have imagined that the series ended there, in only three dimensions! ~ Arthur C. Clarke

People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx. ~ David Stove

Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens
Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to Counsel
It runs a headlong course to desperate madness. ~ John Ford