Quotes About Madness

What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad -- Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! - Capt. Ahab.

Well, well; no more. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, black-smith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad? - What wert thou making there?

Herman Melville

Herman Melville

Herman Melville

I am madness maddened! That wild

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

For a long time, now, the circus-running sun had raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab.

The cheeks of his soul collapsed in him, he dashed himself in blind fury and swift madness against the wall, and fell dabbling in the vomit of his loathed identity.

My cheek blanches white while I write; I start at the scratch of my pen; my own mad brood of eagles devours me; fain would I unsay this audacity; but an iron-mailed hand clenches mine in a vice, and prints down every letter in my spite.

If a drunkard in a sober fit is the dullest of mortals, an enthusiast in a reason-fit is not the most lively. And this, without prejudice to his greatly improved understanding; for, if his elation was the height of his madness, his despondency is but the extreme of his sanity.

and for long months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.

I have found out what it's like to be crazy. It is to stand apart and observe ordinary life all around you with the panic of an actor on stage who has forgotten his lines and his business. What one doesn't realize in ordinary mental health is that daily life is a show. You have to put on a right costume, to improvise right speeches, to do right actions, and all this isn't automatic, it takes concentration and work and a simply amazing degree of control!

Ruin, eldest daughter of Zeus, she blinds us all, that fatal madness—she with those delicate feet of hers, never touching the earth, gliding over the heads of men to trap us all. She entangles one man, now another.

Upon my word, just see how mortal men always put the blame on us gods! We are the source of evil, so they say - when they have only their own madness to think if their miseries are worse than they ought to be.

What I say will be a bit of boasting. The mad wine tells me to do it. Wine sets even a thoughtful man to singing, or sets him into softly laughing, sets him to dancing. Sometimes it tosses out a word that was better unspoken.

With that she loosed from her breasts the breastband, pierced and alluring, with every kind of enchantment woven through it . . . There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

and his body responding with that maddening slowness from which one suffers when chased by the phantoms of nightmare.

S]till the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.

With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.

Sane is rich and powerful. Insane is wrong and poor and weak. The rich are free, the poor are put in cages. Res Ipsa Loquitur, amen. Mahalo.

How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection..