A weekly series that explores a featured theme by pairing classic quotations with urgent images. What recent news items inspired these textual/visual sets? Leave your guesses in the comments, and check back next Wednesday for the answers.

“It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill — it’s a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider.”

—Vincent van Gogh

“To be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless."

—Lacan

“That is why delirium and dazzlement are in a relation which constitutes the essence of madness, exactly as truth and light, in their fundamental relation, constitute classical reason.”

—Foucault

“In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!”

—James Joyce

“Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculptor of his own brain.”
—Santiago Ramon y Cajal

Do you see the connections? Write your guesses in the comments, and check in next Wednesday to find the headlines that inspired these pairings.

Images: twitpic.com/amkkt2, Gawker, mental_floss, New York Times, arch2o.com

Answers to last week's installment:

1. "What Will the Fashion World Do With Kim Kardashian?"
2. "The Case of the Stolen Blanks"
3. "Autism: Banking on new brain donors"
4. "Star is caught devouring planet"
5. "Russian Orthodox clerics forgive punk band for anti-Putin rant, call for mercy"