Quotes About Madness

Imagine, he said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara's answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be.

They'll want him to be mad, of course,' Laszlo mused, not hearing me. 'The doctors here, the newspapers, the judges; they'd like to think that only a madman would shoot a five-year-old girl in the head. It creates certain … difficulties, if we are forced to accept that our society can produce sane men who commit such acts.

The greatest handicap faced by the psychiatrist was, he argued, the inability to experience their patients' conditions; but hashish gave them a means to do so, safely and reversibly: Can we be certain we are in a condition to understand these sick people when they tell us of their observations? [...] To comprehend the ravings of a madman, it is necessary to have raved oneself, but without having lost the awareness of one's madness. -Mike Jay

If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us. --"The Content of the Psychoses

Si empatizamos con los misterios de la persona enferma, la locura también revela su sistema, y reconocemos en la enfermedad mental simplemente una reacción excepcional a problemas emocionales que no nos son ajenos.

If I can demonstrate to a madman that his ideas do not lie beyond the sphere of the human mind, he will still feel part of human society, and there is still hope. As long as you can make yourself understood to one single person, you are not yet mad. And even if you find no such person, you should consult some old books, and perhaps there you will find something that seems familiar to you. Only when you can no longer make yourself understood will you be mad and excluded.

madness. As

Madness, in my personal experience, is mostly the acceptance of a reality that is not commonly agreed-upon. 

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.

But as I descended the rocky path madness seized me and I cried aloud in the night; and as I bent over the silent waters with silver fingers, I saw that my countenance had deserted me. And the white voice spoke to me: Kill yourself! Sighing there arose in me a young boy's shadow and gazed at me radiantly from crystalline eyes, that I sank down weeping beneath the trees, the mighty canopy of stars.

I'm dancing to the music of the madness inside me.

TOPSY: My power is in my . . . EVERYBODY: madness! TOPSY: And my colored contradictions

Oh how the passions, insolent and strong, Bear our weak minds their rapid course along; Make us the madness of their will obey; Then die and leave us to our griefs as prey!

Then since we mortal lovers are, Ask not how long our love may last; But while it does, let us take care Each minute be with pleasure passed: Were it not madness to deny To live because we're sure to die?

The universe was full of wonders. Some of them would drive you insane if you thought about them too long.

Man can't handle the chaos. Oh, you can understand it in the abstract, as long as you don't think about it too hard. But at the core of it, whenever humans come against chaos, they deal with it in one of three ways. ... Faced with chaos you will either ignore it, dance around it, or you will go mad.

was a granite island of calm. When the turbulent storms rocked her inner world, until she was no longer sure where reality ended and the hungry madness inside her began, she clung to that island

She had only two modes of operation: complete control or complete insanity.

Such madness. When you're 20, love is like a fever. It makes you almost delirious. When it's over, you can hardly remember how it happened. Fire in the blood, how quickly it burns out.

It's madness — Madness is where we live now.

I'm as lonely as a lunatic.

She thought, perhaps I am simply mad. It will grow worse. That will be my life.

That this world is a place of horror must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad. Any seriousness avoids this fact at its peril, and the great ones who have seemed to neglect it have only done so in appearance.

We'll see you through, Martin, said Antonia . . . So do not be guilty or worried, darling Martin. I won't be guilty or worried, I'll be raving mad, I said. I don't want you to see me through. I want to be left alone by both of you at long last.