“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?”

—  Leo Tolstoy

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?" by Leo Tolstoy?
Leo Tolstoy photo
Leo Tolstoy 456
Russian writer 1828–1910

Related quotes

Sri Aurobindo photo

“They say, O my God, that I am mad because I see no fault in Thee; but if I am indeed mad with Thy love, I do not wish to recover my sanity.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Bhakti

Sophocles photo

“If I am Sophocles, I am not mad; and if I am mad, I am not Sophocles.”

Sophocles (-496–-406 BC) ancient Greek tragedian

Vit. Anon, page 64 (Plumptre's Trans.).
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Jacques Lipchitz photo

“I am the most curious of all to see what will be the next thing that I will do.”

Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) American and French sculptor

Jacques Lipchitz cited in: Bertie Charles Forbes (1992) Forbes, Vol. 149, Nr. 5-9, p. 424

Elizabeth Hand photo

“I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot.
So what am I going to do about that?”

Elizabeth Hand (1957) American writer

Strange Horizons interview (2004)
Context: I don't think all artists are mad, but there is statistical medical evidence that a lot of creative people suffer from various mood disorders. They fall somewhere on the spectrum of being bipolar, of being borderline autistic and so on. These things are there. Now of course these days you can go to college and when you come out you are a professional artist and you can run a gallery as a business and have a career. That is a very valid way for an artist to make a living. But it doesn't make for a very interesting story. It doesn't have a lot of mythic subtext. … For me a lot of the world really is like that. The scenes in my book that people describe as "such a hallucinatory sequence" … I don't see the world like that all the time, but I see the world like that a lot.
So what am I going to do about that? Am I going to go crazy? Am I going to institutionalize myself? Am I going to go and work in a cubicle as a telemarketer so that I don't give vent to that? Or am I going to take that and channel it into my work? It is a gift.

Norman Spinrad photo
Slavoj Žižek photo

“The original question of desire is not directly 'What do I want?', but 'What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

Source: The Plague of Fantasies (1997), Chapter One: The Seven Veils of Fantasy, p.9

Charles Manson photo
Roland Barthes photo

“mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist
Anthony the Great photo

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, 'You are mad, you are not like us.'”

Anthony the Great (251–357) Christian saint, monk, and hermit

Saying 25, Page 6
From Apophthegmata Patrum

Related topics