Quotes About Madness

I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him.

Whom the gods do not intend to destroy, they first make mad with poetry.

Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.

The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.

Politics and hypocrites is turning us all into lunatics.

The Empress is legitimate, my cousin is Republican, Morny is Orleanist, I am a socialist; the only Bonapartist is Persigny, and he is mad.

Democracy, in its best state, is but the politics of Bedlam; while kept chained, its thoughts are frantic, but when it breaks loose, it kills the keeper, fires the building, and perishes.

What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?

Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized by a madness which forces them to commit the very acts which makes it certain that what they dread shall happen.

Sane, normal people don't need power trips. So the lunatics end up in charge of everything.

Seneca reminds us how small our bodies are and poses this question: "Is it not madness and the wildest lunacy to desire so much when you can hold so little?

A lunatic is indeed properly one that hath lucid intervals; sometimes enjoying his senses, and sometimes not, and that frequently depending upon the change of the moon.

The pure products of Americago crazy—

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale." John Kenneth Galbraith quoted in Money and Power

People are born and married, and live and die, in the midst of an uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it.

Forget the politics of your agony. Politicians are vermin in the soul. They sway with the winds and keep you angry, and anger becomes madness, and madness is the step before death.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

Hunkered there in the darkness, he felt before himself a door, madness already raising the hand to knock.

A sword in a madman's hand, and the word of God in some wicked man's mouth, are used much alike—to hurt only themselves and their best friends with.

But O! what desperate madness is it of sinners then, not to endure a little hardship here, but [to] entail on themselves the eternal wrath of God here after, for the short feast and running banquet their lusts entertain them here withal; which often is not gaudium unius horœ—a joy that lasts an hour.