Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.

A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.

An untamed mind is a minefield.

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and then it ceases feeding on you.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving...

Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.

The mind can never be satisfied.

People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.

When I lately retired to my house I resolved, as far as I could, to meddle in nothing, but to pass in peace and privacy what little time I had to live. It seemed to me I could not better gratify my mind than by giving it full leisure to dwell in its own thoughts and divert itself with them. And I hoped that with the passage of time, it could do this with greater ease as it became more settled and ripe. But the contrary was the case. Like a horse broke loose, it gave itself a hundred times more rein. There rose in me a horde of chimerae and fantastic creatures, one upon the other, without order or relevance. To contemplate more coolly] their queerness and ineptitude I began to put them in writing - hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself. A ming which has no set goal loses itself. To be everywhere is to be nowhere. No wind serves the man bound for no port.

"I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness."

The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill.

In solitude the solitary man consumes himself, in the crowd the crowd consumes him.

Just as iron which is not used grows rusty, and water putrefies and freezes in the cold, so the mind of which no use is made is spoilt.

It is the starved imagination, not the well-nourished, that is afraid.