John Forbes Nash Jr. Quotes

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.

He had delusions of adequacy.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.

… the ravings of a maniac

I lived so completely in my mind - a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!

When you begin to believe you have license because you are a special person breathing special oxygen, that's when you're in big trouble. That's the road to insanity. And a lot of people in the studios are like that. They believe that they are special. I do think actors are blessed, or cursed, with maybe a slightly heightened awareness, which you have to use.

My experience is that when one is in psychosis, you're on a mission and nothing is going to stop you. At some level your brain is telling you you probably shouldn't be doing this, but you're on a mission.

Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself.

The first step towards madness is to think oneself wise.

I was the most important person of the world, and people like the Pope would be just like enemies, who would try to put me down in some way or another, or the president. People are always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering.

When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad.

My name is Stephen Leeds, and I am perfectly sane. My hallucinations, however, are all quite mad.

Like all mad men, I thought everyone was mad except myself.

Madmen always think it's the others who are mad.

He stares at me, and then leans back in his chair. "He's ill, Jacob." I say nothing. "He's a paragon schnitzophonic." "He's what?!" "Paragon schnitzophonic," repeats Uncle Al. "You mean paranoid schizophrenic?" "Sure. Whatever. But the bottom line is he's mad as a hatter.

The place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum.

Much like anyone with too much time on his or her hands, I feel as though I am the most important person on earth and everything I do is relevant. I say the most charming and inspired things when no one is around.

Narcissism falls along the axis of what psychologists call personality disorders, one of a group that includes antisocial, dependent, histrionic, avoidant and borderline personalities. But by most measures, narcissism is one of the worst, if only because the narcissists themselves are so clueless.

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad.

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.

... madness entered my veins.

... the work of lunatics.

... a paranoid person with delusions.