Quotes About Madness

The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane.

I knew I wasn't mad mad because I'd seen people in the grip of psychosis before, and that was madness as obvious as the taste of blood in the mouth. The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous.

It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane. My mind struggled to build across the gap, make a new and inhabitable world. The problem was that it had nothing to work with. There was no partner, no children, no home. No nine-to-five job either. So it grabbed anything it could. It was desperate, and it read off the world wrong.

I knew I wasn't mad mad because I'd seen people in the grip of psychosis before, and that was madness as obvious as the taste of blood in the mouth. The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane.

I often think it would be such a luxury to go mad, and not have to worry about anything. [...] There would be some sort of doctor there to tell me: "Don't worry, Mary, it's just that you're mad. Now be quiet and take this pill." And I would think, So that's all is is, and I would be glad. But aloud I would say, "What? I'm perfectly sane! You're mad...." Only mildly, though; just for show, really.

All lovers in the world are alike: they fall in love by chance; they see each other, and are attached to each other by the features of their faces; they illuminate each other by the fierce preference which is akin to madness; they assert the reality of illusions; and for a moment they change falsehood into truth.

Qui cache son fou, meurt sans voix

He who hides his madman dies voiceless.

Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war. —John Le Carré

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence. —James Baldwin

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy

For some there is no music No lights No fire No untamed madness that breathes life There is work Anguish Frustration Rage Despair A dullness that rings like wooden thunder

I don't want to go with the smooth skin and the calm brow. I hope I end up a blithering idiot cursing the sun - hallucinating, screaming, giving obscene and inane lectures on street corners and public parks.

I recognize, while yawning, the truth of what they say. We are mad. We are hastening to the precipice, something unknown is coming toward us out of the future, something is breaking beneath us, something is dying around us,—agreed! But we shall succeed in dying; meanwhile we have no wish to burden life, and serve death before it takes us. Life exists for itself alone, not for death.

Herd!" repeated Petronius, with contempt; "a people worthy of Cæsar!" And he began to think that a society resting on superior force, on cruelty of which even barbarians had no conception, on crimes and mad profligacy, could not endure. Rome ruled the world, but was also its ulcer.

And indeed, if Evgeny Irtenev was mentally ill, then all people are just as mentally ill, and the most mentally ill are undoubtably those who see signs of madness in others that they do not see in themselves.

Pierre's madness consisted in not waiting, as he had formerly done, to discover personal attributes which he called "good qualities" in people before loving them: his heart overflowed with love, and by loving without cause he never failed to discover undeniable reasons for loving.

Gaiety and grief and despair and tenderness and triumph followed one another without any connection, like the emotions of a madman. And those emotions, like a madman's, sprang up quite unexpectedly.

I may have appeared strange and queer then,' he thought, 'but I was not so mad as I seemed. On the contrary, I was then wiser and had more insight than at any other time, and understood all that is worth understanding in life, because … because I was happy.

Non penso? Non c'è giorno e ora in cui non pensi e non mi rimproveri perché penso... Perché questi pensieri possono far impazzire. Far impazzire.

either the war is insanity, or the people, if they do this insanity, aren't not at all reasonable creatures, as some might , for some reason, think.

Quos vult perdere dementat [Those whom (God) wishes to destroy he drives mad].

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first drive mad.