Monomania Quotes

“To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book — to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor — to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire — to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower — to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind — to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in — Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Berenice

“The world doesn’t need balanced people. Every person should have an idée fixe, an obsession. Only then the world will function well. Like numerous drones doing their part in a beehive, such obsessed people could then contribute to the world. Individually, such people may appear weird, but together they will make our world a much bearable place. Balanced people do not enrich this world; not at all. They are happier, though. We all need to have a monomania. We all need an all-consuming passion.”
― Abhaidev, The Gods Are Not Dead

“All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.”
― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

“That before living agent, now became the living instrument.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Меня всю жизнь интересовали различные виды мономанов – людей, которыми владеет одна-единственная идея, потому что, чем теснее рамки, которыми ограничивает себя человек, тем больше он в известном смысле приближается к бесконечному. Как раз такие, по видимости равнодушные ко всему на свете, люди упорно, как муравьи, строят из какого-то особого материала свой собственный, ни на что не похожий мирок, представляющий для них уменьшенное подобие вселенной.”
― Zweig Stefan

“The great majority of those who came to see me belonged to the gray brotherhood of obsession, people imprisoned within a single idea, an idea not even their own but appropriated from previous generations; people like the inventors of the perpetuum mobile; weak in imagination, and trivial and absurd in their solutions. Yet even they burn with that consuming fire of objectivity that forces a man to renew efforts that are doomed to failure. How pitiful are these flawed geniuses, these titans of stunted spirit, crippled at birth by nature, who, as one of her grim jokes, bestowed upon their talentlessness a creative frenzy worthy of a Leonardo. Their lot in life is indifference or mockery, and all that you can do for them is listen patiently for an hour or two and nod at their monomania.”
― Stanisław Lem, Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy

“Conventionalism is not just rejected by contemporary philosophers, it is vehemently rejected. It is despised and reviled, to the point where anything that hints at conventionalism is immediately and thoughtlessly rejected. Theorists whose views come close to conventionalism often take great pains to distance themselves, lest they too be dubbed heretics. The rejection of conventionalism is now one of the central dogmas of contemporary philosophy.

What explains this state of affairs? Early in the book... I listed a few of the philosophical reasons for the historical failure of conventionalism. ... I don’t think this can be the entire story. The situation is odd. For example, the master argument [went] almost unchallenged in the literature until very recently. That is extremely rare in philosophy, for any argument.
... But philosophical arguments only go so far when it comes to influencing public opinion, no matter their power. There is also a major sociological reason that conventionalism has been widely rejected, one that goes beyond the lingering influence of Quine....

That reason is that conventionalism seems to make things too easy. I mentioned this in the coda to chapter 3 when I compared unrestricted inferentialism’s ability to slice through philosophical tangles to Alexander’s hack through the Gordian knot. Conventionalism not only solves or dissolves many classical problems, it does so easily. Too easily, perhaps. I suspect that many philosophers harbor worries about this. Perhaps because they don’t really want philosophical problems to be solved. I don’t know. I am not sure how widespread this feeling is, but a number of philosophers have personally expressed to me, either directly or indirectly, a desire for philosophical problems to remain open and difficult, and for theories to be as technical and complicated as possible.

I don’t share this desire. I am interested in finding out the truth and resolving the issues that have puzzled me for years. For me, this is not a game. It is deeply personal. The nature of logic and mathematics have long troubled me, but they trouble me no longer. The theory presented in this book has cured me, at least of these particular troubles. But this is confession, not argument.”
― Jared Warren, Shadows of Syntax: Revitalizing Logical and Mathematical Conventionalism