Quotes About Madness

when, if the tale's true, The Pestle of the moon That pounds up all anew Brings me to birth again To find what once I had And know what once I have known, Until I am driven mad

For the others, like me, there is only the flash Of negative knowledge, the night when, drunk, one Staggers to the bathroom and stares in the glass To meet one's madness

Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face- even my own- become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated- a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.

Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.

If he were insane, however, his was a very cool and collected insanity.

Much better to be crazy provided you know what/where sane is.

I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.

Though they go mad they shall be sane, though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; though lovers be lost love shall not; and death shall have no dominion.

...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

How mad it is to summon grim death by means of war!

Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn't know. That's why he was devouring two or three books a day - to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life.

Chaque fois que je levais les yeux je voyais mon petit ami complètement gaga parce que j'étais une reine de beauté à la noix! T'étais un vrai gosse! Il a fallu que tu me transformes en princesse! Eh ben, regarde où ça m'a menée. A l'asile! Elle chez les dingues, ta princesse!

The second crazy wife. Was there any other kind?

I'll remember you acting crazy!

There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric....But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.

Love is a madness produced by an unsatisfiable rational desire to understand the ultimate truth about the world.

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.

There's no truth to that story'—that when a lover is available you should give your favors to a man who doesn't love you instead, because he is in control of himself while the lover has lost his head. That would have been fine to say if madness were bad, pure and simple; but in fact the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god.

The tunes are few, a dozen, the same ones every day, morning and evening : marches to popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraved on our minds and will be the last thing in Lager that we shall forget : they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards.

I had really lost her, and the madness with which I avenged my mistakes on myself, by assaulting my physical self in several senseless ways in order to punish my moral self, contributed very much to the bodily ills under which I lost some of the best years of my life.

Only madmen and historians, he said, believe their lies.

a strange coldness had settled upon Achamian, the monolithic selfishness of which only children and madmen are sometimes capable.

To indulge it is to breed it. To punish it is to feed it. Madness knows no bridle but the knife. —SCYLVENDI