Quotes from a kick-ass/mind-expanding book I just finished by Martin Page called How I Became Stupid. If you often feel that intelligence is a curse, but deep down you know it's a blessing in disguise, I highly recommend this book.

This quote recaps where I was with my life for most of last year and the beginning of this one: "For months now I've been thinking about my illness of thinking too much, and I've established with complete certainity the correlation between my unhappiness and the incontinence of my mind. Probing and pondering and overanalyzing have never given me any advantages; they've only played against me. The process of thought is not a natural one, it hurts; it's as if I were uncovering pieces of broken glass and lengths of barbed wire in the air. I can't seem to stop my brain or to slow it down. I feel like a train, a big old steam train hurtling along the tracks, a train that will never be able to stop because the fuel that makes it so dizzyingly powerful, the coal, is the whole world. Everything I see, feel, and hear throws itself into the furnace of my mind, fires it up and makes it charge on full steam ahead. Probing and pondering and overanalyzing is a kind of social suicide because it means you can no longer take part in this life without inadvertently feeling both like a bird of prey and a vulture picking apart everything it sees. When we try to understand something, more often than not we kill it..."

The next two quotes provide a solution and rationale: "Being a real jerk is a good remedy for my problem. I need a radical treatment: being a jerk will be like chemotherapy for my intelligence. And I'm prepared to take that risk without hesitation. But if, in six months' time, I seem to be enjoying myself a bit too much as a... as a selfish bastard, I'd like you to step in. I'm not trying to become stupid and money-grabbing; I just want to let those molecules circulate in my organism to purge this painful mind. But don't step in before six months."

"I wouldn't want to keep the stupidity itself, but the many beneficial particles floating around in it like trace elements: happiness, a bit of detachment, the ability to avoid suffering by empathizing, a lightness in the way you live and think. Being carefree!"

Finally, this one I just dig; it's so Machiallevian and so well written: "When you realize that you're one of the rare few who observe moral principles in their relationships with others, there is a temptation to sink into amorality, not out of conviction or pleasure but simply to avoid further pain, because there is no greater suffering than being an angel in hell, whereas a devil feels at home wherever he goes. Damnation permits everything and forgives everything. (He) had no choice but to adopt that behavior which consisted of integrating yourself by offering your ideals as a sacrifice. Everything was coming together."

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