“There in the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible–magic to make the sanest man go mad.”

— Homer 1
Primogenitor of Western culture

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“There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”

— Pythagorus 570 – 495 BCE
(of Samos)
"The most influential philosopher of all time"
from Golden Verses of Pythagoras Χρύσεα

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“what is of value and wisdom of one man seems nonsense to another.”

— Buddha गौतम बुद्ध 563 – 483 BCE
(Siddhartha Shakyamuni Gautama)
Awakened Truth

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“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”

— Euripides 480 – 406 BCE
Ancient humanitarian influence continuing today

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“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”

— Plato Πλάτων 428 – 348 BCE
from Republic Πολιτεία

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“When people laughed at him because he walked backward beneath the portico, he said to them: ‘Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?’”

— Diogenes 412 – 323 BCE via Will Durant
(of Sinope)
from Life of Greece

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“I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.”

— Epicurus ɛpɪˈkjɔːrəs 341 – 270 BCE
Western Buddha
from On Nature

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“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”

— Epictetus Ἐπίκτητος 55 – 135 CE
from Discourses of Epictetus, Ἐπικτήτου διατριβαί

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“The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

— Marcus Aurelius 121 – 219 CE
from Meditations Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν

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“If the right man preaches the wrong way, the way will follow the man and become right. If the wrong man preaches the right way, the way will follow the man and become wrong.”

— Joshu, Zhàozhōu Cōngshěn 趙州從諗 778 – 897 CE

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“Name and reality are often at odds. The reality of the Tao remains hidden in no name.”

— Lu Huiqing 1031 – 1111 CE

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“These twelve sayings refer to the Tao as it appears to us. Wherever we look, we see its examples. The Tao as a whole, however, is hidden in namelessness.”

— Su Che 呂洞 1039 – 1112 CE via Red Pine
(Su Zhe)
Great writer of the Tang and Sung dynasties
from Tao-te-chen-ching-chu

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“Operating without self they cannot be buried in the cocoon of past conditioning.”

— Hóngzhì Zhēngjué 宏智正覺 1091 – 1157 CE
(Shōgaku)
from Cultivating the Emplty Field

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“These people are deluded from the first and yet it is such fools that call me mad.”

— Kālapa ཀཱ་ལ་པ། 1 via Keith Dowman
("The Handsome Madman")
Mahasiddha #27
from Masters of Mahamudra

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“When inferior people hear of the Tao, even the ancient sages can’t keep them from laughing. Everyone in the world thinks existence is real. Who wouldn’t shake their head and laugh if they were told that existence wasn’t real and that non-existence was?”

— Li Xizhai 1 via Red Pine
(Li Hsi-Chai)
from Tao-te-chen-ching yi-chieh

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“Truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, this is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.”

— Dōgen Zenji 道元禅師 1200 – 1253 CE

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“The truth of things is a supreme food for fine intelligences, but not for wandering wits.”

— Leonardo da Vinci 1452 – 1519 CE

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“Think with the few and speak with the many… Truth is for the few, error is both common and vulgar… The wise person therefore retires into silence and if he allows himself to come out of it he does so in the shade and before few and fit persons.”

— Balthasar Gracian 1601 – 1658 CE

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“It is great and wise to be ill at ease when your deeds please the mob!”

— Balthasar Gracian 1601 – 1658 CE via Joseph Jacobs, #28

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“To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778 CE

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“Great people, while being very wise, appear to be ignorant; while being very skillful, they appear inept… they cannot be influenced by circumstances… they are not concerned with externals… they find good fortune wherever they are.”

— Liu Yiming 刘一明 1734 – 1821 CE via Thomas Cleary
(Liu I-ming)
from Taoist I Ching, , Zhouyi chanzhen 周易闡真

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“Tell a wise person, or else keep silent, because the mass man will mock it right away.”

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1749 – 1832 CE

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“It is unthinkable that wisdom should ever be popular.”

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1749 – 1832 CE via Eckermann
from Faust, part I

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“Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude… happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.”

— Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1749 – 1832 CE

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“The more narrow-minded a system is the more it will please worldly-wise people.”

— Novalis 1772 – 1831 CE

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“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860 CE

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“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882 CE
Champion of individualism

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“Each place has its own advantages - heaven for the climate, and hell for the society.”

— Mark Twain 1835 – 1910 CE
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
America’s most famous author

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“for business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity.”

— Mark Twain 1835 – 1910 CE
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
America’s most famous author

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“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform… Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.”

— Mark Twain 1835 – 1910 CE
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
America’s most famous author

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“The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900 CE
from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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“an honest being who does not behave absurdly has no chance at all of becoming famous, or even of being noticed, however kind and sensible he may be.”

— G. I. Gurdjieff 1866 – 1949 CE

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“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

— Mahatma Gandhi 1869 – 1948 CE

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“If you are going through hell, keep going.”

— Winston Churchill 1874 – 1965 CE

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“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”

— Winston Churchill 1874 – 1965 CE

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“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

— G. K. Chesterton 1874 – 1936 CE

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“If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.”

— Carl Jung 1875 – 1961 CE
Insightful shamanistic scientist

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“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else”

— Hermann Hesse 1877 – 1962 CE
from Siddhartha

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“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

— Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955 CE

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“Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all … is not to have one.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis 1883 – 1957 CE
from Zorba the Greek

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“Woe to whoever commences his life without lunacy... Happy the youth who believes that his duty is to remake the world and bring it more in accord with virtue and justice, more in accord with his own heart.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis 1883 – 1957 CE via P. A. Bien
from Report to Greco

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“We do not pass through the same door twice or return to the door through which we did not pass.”

— T. S. Eliot 1888 – 1965 CE

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“The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.”

— Aldous Huxley 1894 – 1963 CE

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“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”

— Aldous Huxley 1894 – 1963 CE

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“...they didn’t think there was anything very odd in anyone being a little odd.”

— James Hilton 1900 – 1954 CE
from Lost Horizon

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“Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1900 – 1944 CE

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“You can’t be so stuck up, so inhuman, that you want to be pure, your soul wrapped in a plastic bag.”

— John Fire Lame Deer 1903 – 1976 CE via Richard Erdoes
from Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

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“You’ve made a blondie out of Jesus… You’ve tried to make him into an Anglo-Saxon Fuller Brush salesman, a long haired Billy Graham… it is dishonest.”

— John Fire Lame Deer 1903 – 1976 CE via Richard Erdoes
from Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

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“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a hallucinating idiot...for he sees what no one else does: things that, to everyone else, are not there.”

— Marshall McLuhan 1911 – 1980 CE

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“There is no question that the kind of thought and culture represented by Chuang Tzu was what transformed highly speculative Indian Buddhism into the humorous, iconoclastic, and totally practical kind of Buddhism what was to flourish in China and in Japan in the various schools of Zen.”

— Thomas Merton 1915 – 1968 CE

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“Much of what we call History is the success stories of madmen.”

— John Holt 1923 – 1985 CE
from How Children Fail

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“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves… because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”

— Noam Chomsky 1928 CE –

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“From the point of view of samsara, Buddha is mad.”

— Chögyam Trungpa 1939 – 1987 CE
from Illusion's Game

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“… crazy wisdom is absolute perceptiveness, with fearlessness and bluntness… being wise, but not holding to particular doctrines or disciplines or formats. There aren’t any books to follow, only endless spontaneity… all activity is created by the environment.”

— Chögyam Trungpa 1939 – 1987 CE
from Journey Without Goal

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“What seems to be insane is enlightenment.”

— Chögyam Trungpa 1939 – 1987 CE
from Illusion's Game

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“It's weird not to be weird.”

— John Lennon 1940 – 1980 CE

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“Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.”

— John Lennon 1940 – 1980 CE

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“And if my thought-dreams could be seen... they'd probably put my head in a guillotine.”

— Bob Dylan 1941 CE –

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“Those who do not pursue praise and gain, those who do not shun criticism and loss may be stigmatized as insane because they cannot be lured by material gain, don’t look for thrills, have no face to lose, never do anything to impress people.”

— Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche རྫོང་གསར་ འཇམ་དབྱངས་ མཁྱེན་བརྩེ་ རིན་པོ་ཆེ། 1961 CE –
(Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche)
"Activity" incarnation of Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo
from What Makes You Not a Buddhist

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