“It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.”

— Antonin Artaud

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

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Antonin Artaud 44

French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre direc… 1896–1948

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“Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
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Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
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all too human
this breathing
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moving this little bit of light toward us
impossibly.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

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“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

“The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.”

Honoré de Balzac book Une fille d'Ève

L'homme qui peut empreindre perpétuellement la pensée dans le fait est un homme de génie; mais l'homme qui a le plus de génie ne le déploie pas à tous les instants, il ressemblerait trop à Dieu.
Source: A Daughter of Eve (1839), Ch. 3: The Story of a Happy Woman.

“There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

"On the Sufferings of the World"
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Studies in Pessimism

“The Mass is Idolatry. All worshipping, honouring, or service invented by the brain of man in the religion of God, without his own express commandment, is idolatry. The Mass is invented by the brain of man, without any commandment of God; therefore it is idolatry.”

John Knox (1514–1572) Scottish clergyman, writer and historian

John Knox, A Vindication of the Doctrine that the Sacrifice of the Mass is Idolatry http://www.swrb.com/newslett/actualNLs/vindicat.htm, 1550; as quoted in Selected Writings of John Knox: Public Epistles, Treatises, and Expositions to the Year 1559

“[I]t is impossible for men who exercise their reason to believe that any one part of the human race has been marked out by God or nature as so superior to any other. No man is by nature, or by manifest declaration of God's will, the possessor or possession, the master or slave, of another. Whoever asserts such a right to such domination or possession is, in Congress's words from that same document, 'rightfully resistible.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 370

“It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

“It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

G 4
Variant translations:
It is almost impossible to carry the torch of wisdom through a crowd without singeing someone's beard.
It is virtually impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd, without singeing someone's beard
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)

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Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Existence (1958), p. 36; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part II : The Cultural Background, Ch. 5 : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, p. 87

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