Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from A Beautiful Mind:
“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.”
“You are all my reasons.”
“Hey Nash! You scared?''Terrified,mortified,petrified...stupefied by you!”
“A profile, a look, a voice, can capture a heart in no time at all.”
“RAND scientists tried to tell their wives that the decision whether to buy or not to buy a washing machine was an 'optimization problem'.”
“People look to the order of numbers when the world falls apart.”
“I thought I could save a very worthwhile person.”
“It was like a tornado, you want to hold on to everything you have, you don't want to let anything go.”
“A profound dislike for merely absorbing knowledge and a strong compulsion to learn by doing is one of the most reliable signs of genius.”
“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”
“...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.”
“His heroes were solitary thinkers and supermen like Newton and Nietzsche.”
“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.”
“Steenrod was a careful, methodical man who chose his suits and sports coats according to a mathematical formula and had a mania for thinking up highly logical, if impractical, solutions to social problems like crime.”
“Many great scientists and philosophers, among them René Descartes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Thorstein Veblen, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, have had similarly strange and solitary personalities.”
“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!”
“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.”
“Der Herr Gott ist raffiniert aber Boshaft ist Er nicht,”
“Nash’s genius was of that mysterious variety more often associated with music and art than with the oldest of all sciences. It wasn’t merely that his mind worked faster, that his memory was more retentive, or that his power of concentration was greater. The flashes of intuition were non-rational. Like other great mathematical intuitionists — Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, Jules Henri Poincaré, Srinivasa Ramanujan — Nash saw the vision first, constructing the laborious proofs long afterward.”
“Other mathematical geniuses, Einstein and Bertrand Russell among them, recount similarly revelatory experiences in early adolescence.”
“A genius with a penis. Isn’t that what we all want?” an actress once quipped, and the quip captures the combination of brains, status, and sex appeal that made Nash so irresistible.”
“Nash was respected but not well liked.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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”
“Woodrow Wilson, like most other educated Americans of his time, despised mathematics, complaining that “the natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be learned by painful processes of drill.”
“How many of the great mathematicians have been perverts?” None, was his answer. “Some lived celibate lives, usually on account of economic disabilities, but the majority were happily married. . . . The only mathematician discussed here whose life might offer something of interest to a Freudian is Pascal”
“profound dislike for merely absorbing knowledge and a strong compulsion to learn by doing is one of the most reliable signs of genius.”
“[...] a decade as notable for its supreme faith in human rationality as for its dark anxieties about mankind’s survival [...]”
“In 1950, he was accorded the dubious honor of being the first prominent scientist to appear on the earliest of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s famous lists of crypto-communists.”
