Quotes from A Beautiful Mind

Sylvia Nasar ·  461 pages

Rating: (108.8K votes)


“I've made the most important discovery of my life. It's only in the mysterious equation of love that any logic or reasons can be found.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“A profile, a look, a voice, can capture a heart in no time at all.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“RAND scientists tried to tell their wives that the decision whether to buy or not to buy a washing machine was an 'optimization problem'.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“Hey Nash! You scared?'
'Terrified,mortified,petrified...stupefied by you!”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“It was like a tornado, you want to hold on to everything you have, you don't want to let anything go.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind



“People look to the order of numbers when the world falls apart.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“I thought I could save a very worthwhile person.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“Fermat’s assertion that if n is any whole number and p any prime, then n multiplied by itself p times minus n is divisible by p.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“...his condition in Roanoke is a strong testament that lassitude, indifference and the peculiarities of his thought were primarily the consequences of his illness and not of the early attempts to treat it.

The popular view that anti-psychotics were chemical straight jackets that suppressed clear thinking and voluntary activity seems not to be borne out in Nash's case.

If anything, the only periods when he was relatively free of hallucinations, delusions and the erosion of will were the periods following either insulin treatment or the use of anti psychotics.

In other words, rather than reducing Nash to a zombie, medication seemed to reduce zombie like behavior.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“In The Dynamics of Creation, Anthony Storr, the British psychiatrist, contends that an individual who “fears love almost as much as he fears hatred” may turn to creative activity not only out of an impulse to experience aesthetic pleasure, or the delight of exercising an active mind, but also to defend himself against anxiety stimulated by conflicting demands for detachment and human contact.21”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind



“James Glass, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who has studied the delusions of schizophrenia, writes, “Delusion provides a certain, often unbreakable identity, and its absolute character can maneuver the self into an unyielding position. In this respect, it is the internal mirror of political authoritarianism, the tyrant inside the self … an internal domination as deadly as any external tyranny.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“Der Herr Gott ist raffiniert aber Boshaft ist Er nicht,”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“Nash’s lifelong quest for meaning, control, and recognition in the context of a continuing struggle, not just in society, but in the warring impulses of his paradoxical self, was now reduced to a caricature. Just as the overconcreteness of a dream is related to the intangible themes of waking life, Nash’s search for a piece of paper, a carte d’identité, mirrored his former pursuit of mathematical insights. Yet the gulf between the two recognizably related Nashes was as great as that between Kafka, the controlling creative genius, struggling between the demands of his self-chosen vocation and ordinary life, and K, a caricature of Kafka, the helpless seeker of a piece of paper that will validate his existence, rights, and duties. Delusion is not just fantasy but compulsion. Survival, both of the self and the world, appears to be at stake. Where once he had ordered his thoughts and modulated them, he was now subject to their peremptory and insistent commands.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“42 A few months after Nash got out, Baumecker called the Institute for Advanced Study and asked to speak to Oppenheimer about whether Nash was now sane. Oppenheimer replied, “That’s something no one on earth can tell you, doctor.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“Among the students, the Phantom was often held up as a cautionary figure: Anybody who was too much of a grind or who lacked social graces was warned that he or she was “going to wind up like the Phantom.”10 Yet if a new student complained that having him around made him feel uncomfortable, he was immediately warned: “He was a better mathematician than you’ll ever be!”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind



“A profound dislike for merely absorbing knowledge and a strong compulsion to learn by doing is one of the most reliable signs of genius.”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


“several studies have since shown that basic military training during peacetime can precipitate schizophrenia in men with a hitherto unsuspected vulnerability to the illness.15”
― Sylvia Nasar, quote from A Beautiful Mind


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About the author

Sylvia Nasar
Born place: in Rosenheim, Germany
Born date August 17, 1947
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Popular quotes

“A man’s first taste of the poppy gives him something glorious and wonderful, something that he strives to recapture with each return to the resin, but in the end he needs to smoke it just to feel human. Life is the same for many of us—a few scant years of golden youth when everything tastes sweet, every experience new and sharp with meaning. Then a long slow grind to the grave, trying and failing to recapture that feeling you had when you were seventeen and the world rolled out before you.”
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― Polly Horvath, quote from Everything on a Waffle


“She might not be as hard-hitting as Tzivia, but she had a depth of sincerity and gentleness that he appreciated. Needed. She cared about people. In the war of life, she was the medic and he the guy on the front lines fighting.”
― Ronie Kendig, quote from Crown of Souls


“Now her hair is like the nights of disunion and separation and her face like the days of union and delectation; She hath a nose like the edge of the burnished blade and cheeks like purple wine or anemones blood-red: her lips as coral and carnelian shine and the water of her mouth is sweeter than old wine; its taste would quench Hell's fiery pain. Her tongue is moved by wit of high degree and ready repartee: her breast is a seduction to all that see it (glory be to Him who fashioned it and finished it!); and joined thereto are two upper arms smooth and rounded; She hath breasts like two globes of ivory, from whose brightness the moons borrow light, and a stomach with little waves as it were a figured cloth of the finest Egyptian linen made by the Copts, with creases like folded scrolls, ending in a waist slender past all power of imagination; based upon back parts like a hillock of blown sand, that force her to sit when she would fief stand, and awaken her, when she fain would sleep, And those back parts are upborne by thighs smooth and round and by a calf like a column of pearl, and all this reposeth upon two feet, narrow, slender and pointed like spear-blades, the handiwork of the Protector and Requiter, I wonder how, of their littleness, they can sustain what is above them.”
― quote from The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night


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