Quotes About Madness

Saul Bellow escribió una vez que, en una época de locura, creerse inmunes a la locura es una forma de locura.

Ora penso invece che il mondo sia un enigma benigno, che la nostra follia rende terribile perché pretende di interpretarlo secondo la propria verità. I

Estoy persuadido de que el mundo es un enigma benigno, que nuestra locura vuelve terrible porque pretende interpretarlo con arreglo a su propia verdad.

The musicians-how shall one begin to describe them? All this time they have been there, playing in a mad frenzy-all of this scene must be read, or said, or sung, to music. It is the music which makes it what it is; it is the music which changes the place from the rear room of a saloon in back of the yards to a fairy place, a wonderland, a little corner of the high mansions of the sky.

Truly it seemed that a great people had gone mad; but it is a fact well known to alienists that you cannot convince a madman of his own condition, and only make him madder by trying.

But this is madness. I am going in the wrong direction. There can't be a new life at the end of this.

Si yo no hiciera al menos una locura por año, me volvería loco

You would have imagined her at one moment a maniac, at another a queen.

When a man does wrong, he should do all the wrong he can; it is madness to stop half-way in crime!

It was said of him that he had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit to some such legend about us.

When those we love are in question, our prudence invents every sort of madness.

She had spears of straw and grass in her hair, not like Ophelia gone mad through contact with Hamlet's madness, but because she had slept in some stable loft.

The heat made people crazy. They woke from their damp bedsheets and went in search of a glass of water, surprised to find that when their vision cleared, they were holding instead the gun they kept hidden in the bookcase. Children cried out in their sleep, and even doses of liquid Tylenol couldn't cool their fevered skin. All over town, birds fell from phone wires and landed in pathetic, crumpled heaps on the thirsty lawns.

It was the war that kept us apart. The world went mad, and your grandfather was no more responsible for the outcome than I was, or than Rose was. We all made our choices. We all had to live with our regrets.

What has happened to us? She asked. To this country? The world has gone mad, Jacob murmured.

Perhaps true faith is a form of insanity.

People live so much in a world of appearances, that claim lack of character is madness.

He could not forget the past, and he didn't really wish to. Despite everything that had happened, he cherished Katherine's memory. But there was one memory he must truly not disturb, one page of the journal he must not turn. If he had to relive that horror, that… abomination, he would go mad. As he had been mad that day, that final day, when he had looked upon his own damnation.

Madmen and fools see everything through the medium of humor.

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university.... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.

The schizophrenic may indeed be mad. He is mad. He is not ill. I have been told by people who have been through the mad experience how what was then revealed to them was veritable manna from Heaven. The person's whole life may be changed, but it is difficult not to doubt the validity of such vision. Also, not everyone comes back to us again.

From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is not "true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves.

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.