Quotes About Madness

Silence, like madness, is only comparative.

I look at this place (Antigua), I look at these people (Antiguans), and I cannot tell whether I was brought up by, and so come from, children, eternal innocents, or artists who have not yet found eminence in a world too stupid to understand, or lunatics who have made their own lunatic asylum, or an exquisite combination of all three.

You don't appreciate the fact that madmen are very lucky.

Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.

Love is one of society's many socially accepted forms of madness.

The moment when a limit is reached, when there is nothing ahead but darkness: something comes in to help that is not real. Another way all this is like madness: a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.

a mad person not helped out of his trouble by anything real begins to trust what is not real because it helps him and he needs it because real things continue not to help him.

Mas o que seria loucura, recusar a realidade ou pactuar com ela?

Ao passar pela porta do quarto azul, susteve a respiração. "A mãe dormiu." Era tão bom quando ela dormia! Os loucos deviam dormir o tempo todo, de dia e de noite, como as bonecas que só abrem os olhos quando tiradas da caixa.

The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense -- it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream.

War is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world.

How could a woman who was that beautiful, who smelled that good, who had such perfectly lovely teeth and bright eyes, be so thoroughly, completely, entirely, stark raving mad?" ~ Robert Cameron

No battle was ever won by wholly sane men.

Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.

Always love to the point of madness," he said, "or else what is the point of love?

A loucura, objeto dos meus estudos, era até agora uma ilha perdida no oceano da razão; começo a suspeitar que é um continente.

My whole life, I had waited for tragedy to find me. I never doubted that it would... A dozen times grief had scorched, but its fire had never burned through my skin. My madness in those days rose from a new certainty: that at last, I had met the thing the gods could use against me.

Then the best part of him died, and he was even more difficult after that. [...] "What was his best part?" "His lover, Patroclus. He didn't like me much, but then the good ones never do. Achilles went mad when he died; nearly mad, anyway.

I clap my hands over my ears. The voices of the dead were said to have the power to make the living mad. I must not hear him speak.

The voices of the dead were said to have the power to make the living mad.

Yet some say lovers are mad.

My friend Meyer, the economist, says that cretins are the only humans who can be absolutely certain of their own sanity. All the rest of us go rocketing along rickety rails over spavined bridges and along the edge of bottomless gorges. The man who believes himself free of any taint of madness is a damned liar.

There is a pleasure sure in being mad which none but madmen know -John Dryden

It is me. I am his madness. For years he's been looking for something to put his madness into. And he found me.