"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity."
— Jean Dubuffet

"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
— Akira Kurosawa

"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. "
— Nikola Tesla

"One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream."
— Iris Murdoch

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."

"I don't much care where –"

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

"The biggest adventure you can ever take is to live the life of your dreams."
— Oprah Winfrey

"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures."
— Alexandre Dumas

"I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have hear of me."
— Patrick Rothfuss

"No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions."
— Isak Dinesen (Out of Africa)

"A lie travels half-way around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots."
— Mark Twain

""'I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone.' 'I should think so — in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!'" — Gandalf and Bilbo, "
— jrr tolkein

"I always secretly looked forward to nothing going as planned. That way, I wasn't limited by my imagination. That way, anything can, and always did, happen."
— Crimethinc

""All we are is dust in the wind," dude."
— Ted Logan

"Life's most beautiful and inspiring moments occur at 3am, just prowling, looking for nothing but always finding something."
— Crimethinc (Evasion)

"'...I'd like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get out of Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But I fear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you are even more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back to see one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something every American should see at least once in his life. But for some reason incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly as possible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover.

Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.

You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.

My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.'

-Christopher Johnson McCandless a.k.a. "Alex Supertramp" in a letter to acquaintance Ronald A. Franz
"
— Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild)

"To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"It's a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful."
— Hiromu Arakawa

"Even when our eyes are closed, there's a whole world that exists outside ourselves and our dreams."
— Hiromu Arakawa (Fullmetal Alchemist, Vol. 1)

""When I was certain he was going to kill me, my mind went blank, and I didn't have any hope anymore. All I could do was scream my lungs out. I felt so helpless, I couldn't even bring myself to believe someone might save me. And then you showed up Al, and I realized that if we don't take care of each other then no one else will. So I'll do anything in my power to get our bodies back, even if it means being the militaries lap dog. And we'll just have to hope our powers are good enough to help us rise above our own limits. Because we're not Gods, we're humans, tiny insignificant humans. Who couldn't even save a little girl. "
Edward- Elric"
— Hiromu Arakawa

"The universe is a lot more complicated than you might think even if you start from a position of thinking that its pretty damn complicated to begin with."
— Douglas Adams

"Nothing happens until something moves."
— Albert Einstein

"Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns it calls me on and on across the universe."
— John Lennon

"He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. "I will go mad!" he annouced."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1-4)

""You would hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison."

"What monsters may they be?"

Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky... In these our sight plunges quite beyond any twinkler we have yet visited. Those deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone the human body! and think of the side caverns and secondary abysses to right and left as you pass on!...

"There is a size at which dignity begins," he exclaimed; "further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying that those minds who exert their imaginative powers to bury themselves in the depths of that universe merely strain their faculties to gain a new horror?""
— Thomas Hardy (Two On A Tower)

"If the universe has no meaning, then we never should have found out it had no meaning."
— C.S. Lewis

"I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.
Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right -- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that. Did you ever see the way the clouds love a mountain? They circle all around it; sometimes you can't even see the mountain for the clouds. But you know what? You go up top and what do you see? His head. The clouds never cover the head. His head pokes through, beacuse the clouds let him; they don't wrap him up. They let him keep his head up high, free, with nothing to hide him or bind him. You can't own a human being. You can't lose what you don't own. Suppose you did own him. Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself."
— Toni Morrison

"Eccentricity is not, as some would 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."
— Edith Sitwell

"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."
— Rabindranath Tagore

""I am not sure of the weapons that will be used in WW III, but I know in WW IV we will use sticks and stones..." "
— Albert Einstein

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk a sign?"
— Albert Einstein

"Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper."
— –Albert Einstein

"My dad said to me a few years ago: "There's no harm in thinking." We were talking about Crazy Uncle Albert and whether it was right to use your brain to build weapons.

He said, "You can't expect people not to think. Not to know things just because they COULD be bad."

I said, "Yeah, but then they built it and a hundred thousand people died."

My dad laughed and said there were a lot of steps between the thinking and the doing.

Which I know, duh. All I was saying is that when you think of doing something, you don't always know the consequences. For a while people THOUGHT about building the bomb, but nothing happened. In the end it was a lot of different people doing a lot of different things, most of which had nothing to do with the bomb, that did make it happen.

I think about that sometimes. Who was the person who had the first thought, the one that started it all?

And after they had the thought, what was the first thing they did?

I know my uncle never thought, Hey, all this great science- one day I'll use it to kill a whole bunch of people. You just look at his picture; he's not that kind of person.

And yet, I guess in a way he sort of is."
— Mariah Fredericks (Head Games)

"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little planet, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be prompted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. On the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food handed out under such coercion were to be selected accordingly. "
— Albert Einstein

"Einstein said that if quantum mechanics were correct then the world would be crazy. Einstein was right - the world is crazy."
— Daniel M. Greenberger

"To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles? To die, to sleep, no more! and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is air to. 'Tis a consummation devoutely to be wished. To die, to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream; Aye there's the rub that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love, the laws delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes. When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? For who would Fardels bare to grunt and sweat under a dreary life. But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose born, no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have then fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscious does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sickeled o'er with the pale cast of thought. And enterprises of great pith and moment, with this regard, their current turn ary, and lose the name of action. Soft you now thy fair Ophelia, Nymph in thy orisions. Be all my sins remembered"
— William Shakespeare

"Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it's like they didn't fade away at all."
— Bob Dylan (Chronicles: Volume One)

"It is cognition that is the fantasy.... Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will... My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the verbal level. The negation of cognition thus correlates to the negation of language. For when those two pillars of Western humanism, individual cognition and evolutionary continuity, lose their meaning, language loses meaning. Existence ceases for the individuum as we know it, and all becomes chaos. You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence."
— Haruki Murakami (Murakami Omnibus: "A Wild Sheep Chase", "Dance Dance Dance")

"Assessing existence while failing to embrace the insights of modern physics would be like wrestling in the dark with an unknown opponent."
— Brian Greene

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"Don’t you know what god is? God is everything and God is nothing; for the perfection created by man cannot be anything other than nothing. They decided to give a name to nothingness, and thereby the made it become something. Like you… God, who is nothing, can no longer be nothing since he is God. You could be a god for men. They need to give a body to nothingness so that nothingness can be seen and touched-at least with the imagination."
— Aldo Palazzeschi (Man of Smoke)

"Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live."
— Albert Camus (Lyrical and Critical Essays)

"To be brave is to love someone unconditionally, without expecting anything in return. To just give. That takes courage, because we don't want to fall on our faces or leave ourselves open to hurt.
"
— Madonna

"Until you're ready to look foolish, you'll never have the possibility of being great.

"
— Cher

"It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something that we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had a first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind."
— Sharon Creech (Walk Two Moons)