Quotes About John Nash

#1. Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both.

Nancy C. Andreasen

#2. I later spent ... five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#3. You don't have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#4. I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition ... Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#5. It's better to be dead, or even perfectly well, than to suffer from the wrong affliction. The man who owns up to arthritis in a beri-beri year is as lonely as a woman in a last month's dress.

John Forbes Nash

#6. Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.

John Forbes Nash

#7. People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#8. I went to M.I.T. in the summer of 1951 as a 'C.L.E. Moore Instructor.' I had been an instructor at Princeton for one year after obtaining my degree in 1950. It seemed desirable more for personal and social reasons than academic ones to accept the higher-paying instructorship at M.I.T.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#9. In a dream it's typical not to be rational.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#10. As a graduate student I studied mathematics fairly broadly, and I was fortunate enough, besides developing the idea which led to 'Non-Cooperative Games,' also to make a nice discovery relating to manifolds and real algebraic varieties.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#11. I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#12. I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#13. I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia.

John Forbes Nash

#14. I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#15. It's almost as if a demon might have passed from one host to another.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#16. In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#17. Lindsay is unique in that she's a star in creating. She'll create something out of nothing, either for herself or her teammates. She's the Steve Nash of the WNBA.

John Whisenant

#18. As you will find in multivariable calculus, there is often a number of solutions for any given problem.

John Forbes Nash

#19. I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However, this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#20. I know that if I could really understand mental illness, then it would be appropriate to make a big career shift. I would become a therapist and a leader in terms of mental illness. But I'm not in the position.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#21. To some extent, sanity is a form of conformity. People are always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering. But it's really not so simple. I think mental illness or madness can be an escape also.

John F. Nash

#22. What truly is logic? Who decides reason? [ ... ] It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reason can be found.

John Nash

#23. Beneath this slab John Brown is stowed. He watched the ads, And not the road.

Ogden Nash

#24. I did have strange ideas during certain periods of time.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#25. Some people know Rosa Parks, they know Daisy Bates in Arkansas, but every ... Ruby Doris Smith, Diane Nash, countless individuals.

John Lewis

#26. Though I had success in my research both when I was mad and when I was not, eventually I felt that my work would be better respected if I thought and acted like a 'normal' person.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#27. To some extent, people who are insane are nonconformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#28. Don't ... depend on current fashion or ... popular opinion.

John F. Nash

#29. There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#30. The only thing greater than the power of the mind is the courage of the heart

John Nash

#31. Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.

John Nash

#32. Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.

John Forbes Nash

#33. Nowadays we can do computer experiments using Mathematica, and even solve a system of 42 equations. This offers another route to knowledge, rather than mere ideas.

John Forbes Nash