Quotes About Madness

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

For the great Gaels of IrelandAre the men that God made mad,For all their wars are merry,And all their songs are sad.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

I suppose it is much more comfortable to be mad and know it, than to be sane and have one's doubts.

Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.

What is madness...to go on platonically loving a woman who will never love you.

Gérard de Nerval

The last madness I'll probably persist in is to believe myself a poet: it will be up to the critics to cure me.

There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

we can't hide from it, we are all touched by the madness of it.

I'm the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and cigarette and arrogance, ready to deal with the madness. Oh, I've got it all sewn up. I can save you. If it takes the last drop of your blood, I'll drive your demons away. I'll kick them in the bollocks and spit on them when they're down and then I'll be gone back into darkness, leaving only a nod and a wink and a wisecrack. I walk my path alone... who would walk with me?

Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh."8

Know that it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!...Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore can never leave me again!...Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me!

Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen.

To remember everything is a form of madness.

Joshua had been overcome by his own righteous indignation. He had become so obsessed with Yahweh's war that he forgot he was a servant and not the sovereign. He became momentarily blinded by the delusion that he could do no wrong. And when his hatred for evil was projected outward, he was overwhelmed by his rage and forgot the evil in himself. His momentary madness was the potential of every living person.

He wanted to call it madness, but knew better. If this was madness, it wasn't his, nor even Cecil's. It was a madness that had anchored itself into the world, hiding in plain sight, and he was only now waking up to it.

A French general, Pierre Bosquet, famously remarked, "It is magnificent, but it is not war: it is madness.

Shower while there were two dead bodies in the bathtub, and he was sane. He drilled holes in the heads of living people to make them his unresisting companions, and he was sane. He ate a bicep which he fried in a skillet, tenderised and sprinkled with sauce, and he was sane. For hours he lay with corpses, hugging them, cherishing them, and he was sane. He kept eleven assorted heads and skulls, and two complete skeletons, for eventual use in a home-made temple, and he was sane.

Dude, I've known people who pretend to be crazy, but you, my friend, are the real deal.

Gekkenhuizen worden gebouwd om mensen die er niet opgesloten zitten te laten geloven dat ze nog bij hun verstand zijn. (Michel Eyquem de Montaigne)

Chi può dirci dove si trova il confine tra la pazzia e la ragione? Dove la mente umana cessa di essere ordinata? Dove comincia e dove finisce la facoltà di sentire e di discernere tra il dolore autentico e quello dovuto solo all'autosuggestione, tra la vera gioia e quella fittizia?