The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one’s designs to one’s means.

I don’t believe it. Prove it to me and I still won’t believe it.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.

The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation from their purposes.

Piety is not a goal but a means to attain through the purest peace of mind the highest culture.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Party-spirit at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I have to be seen to be believed.

Faith is a knowledge within the heart, beyond the reach of proof.

With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

I’m the proof – you can’t throw away tradition.

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

Doubt in my tradition is something that is very helpful. Because of doubt, you can thirst more and you will get a higher kind of proof.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

Confusion of goals and perfection of means seems, in my opinion, to characterize our age.

I find myself hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.

With impressive proof on all sides of magnificent progress, no one can rightly deny the fundamental correctness of our economic system.

It’s not bragging if you can back it up.

Perhaps, as some wit remarked, the best proof that there is Intelligent Life in Outer Space is the fact it hasn’t come here. Well, it can’t hide forever – one day we will overhear it.

Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.

In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.