Math is at only one remove from magic.

— Neel Burton

My basic political principle: If something, whether right- or left-wing, is driven by love and solidarity, it is right; if it is driven by hate and fear it is wrong. Simple as that.

— Neel Burton

My cough is much worse at night and often prevents me from sleeping. It is not so much the daytime tiredness that I resent, but the inability to proceed uninterrupted with my dreams, to run and play with my fancies, and, at last, in the early hours of the morning, to be visited with visions like a holy madman. The dreamer is like a Delian diver, fishing for pearls from the depths of our inner sea of knowledge; and I must have solved, or rather resolved, many more problems in my sleep than in my conscious hours.

— Neel Burton

No one ever pays to learn the most important things.

— Neel Burton

Now, it so happens that our culture—or lack of it, for our culture is in a state of flux and crisis—places a high value on materialism, and, by extension, greed. Our culture’s emphasis on greed is such that people have become immune to satisfaction. Having acquired one thing, they are immediately ready to desire the next thing that might suggest itself. Today, the object of desire is no longer satisfaction, but desire itself.

— Neel Burton

Of all funny things, truth is the funniest.

— Neel Burton

One needs to be either more brave or more good, because if courage is lacking goodness can substitute, while cowardice is the deficiency of both.

— Neel Burton

One of the central tenets of the Western worldview is that one should always be engaged in some kind of outward task. Thus, the Westerner structures his time—including, sometimes, even his leisure time—as a series of discrete programmed activities which he must submit to in order to tick off from an actual or virtual list. One need only observe the expression on his face as he plows through yet another family outing, cultural event, or grueling exercise routine to realize that his aim in life is not so much to live in the present moment as it is to work down a never-ending list. If one asks him how he is doing, he is most likely to respond with an artificial smile, and something along the lines of, ‘Fine, thank you – very busy of course!’ In many cases, he is not fine at all, but confused, exhausted, and fundamentally unhappy. In contrast, most people living in a country such as Kenya in Africa do not share in the Western worldview that it is noble or worthwhile to spend all of one’s time rushing around from one task to the next. When Westerners go to Kenya and do as they are wont to do, they are met with peels of laughter and cries of ‘mung’, which is Swahili for ‘Westerner’. The literal translation of ‘mung’ is ‘one who moves around’, ‘to go round and round’, or ‘to turn around in circles’.

— Neel Burton

Other pressing problems with the current medical model [of mental disorder] is that it encourages false epidemics, most glaringly in bipolar disorder and ADHD, and the wholesale exportation of Western mental disorders and Western accounts of mental disorder. Taken together, this is leading to a pandemic of Western disease categories and treatments, while undermining the variety and richness of the human experience.

— Neel Burton

Our life is just as long or short as our remembering: as rich as our imagining, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking.

— Neel Burton