Quotes About Madness

In his classic work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, published in 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay argued that people "go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."1 People in crowds often act in thoughtless ways—shouting profanities, destroying property, throwing bricks, threatening others.

I kept seeing Yolanda on the parquet, two men pinning her to the ground, her eyes loaded with hatred and madness combing her hair. I was stormed by her image and my heart could not bear it. We know so little about people. But about the people we love, we know even less.

don't we all have moments of madness?

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way—then because they also have depression, I think they're more in touch with human suffering.

That word doesn't have any fuckin' meaning for me. In this life, some people are just less mad than others. That's all.

The shocked silence of last night had given way to mutterings which had become resignation, then calm acceptance: Uaithne had killed a Brigannon, yes, had plunged them all into a feud with another tribe that might be the death of them all before spring, but she was also Echraidhe, one of them, their sister, and her madness-if it was madness-was bright and proud and beautiful.

She walked alone in the rain, half mad with trying not to remember the soft warmth of Onnen's motherly breast and the smell of her clothes, trying not to think of the glint of firelight on Begu's escaping hair because then she'd remember it always, one more meory to torment her.

As she rode, her dreams filled with that yielding breast and warm breath and those luscious lips until she thought she might run mad.

Posterity is not going to understand what an achievement mere good sense is in this insane century.

Often I look back on the wasted years of the Mao Tze-tung era and the madness of the Cultural Revolution. I feel deeply saddened that so many lives were needlessly sacrificed. I was glad when the Cultural Revolution was officially declared a national catastrophe but I regret the Communist Party leadership's inability or unwillingness to repudiate Mao's policy in explicit terms.

This world is full of the most outrageous nonsense. Sometimes things happen which you would hardly think possible.

However foolish be a madman's words, they may yet prove sufficient to sow doubt in the minds of saner individuals.

Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all:

The long-forgotten, living eyes of the portrait began to torment him, and then his madness became dreadful. All the people who surrounded his bed seemed to him horrible portraits. The portrait doubled and quadrupled itself; all the walls seemed hung with portraits, which fastened their living eyes upon him; portraits glared at him from the ceiling, from the floor; the room widened and lengthened endlessly, in order to make room for more of the motionless eyes.

A man needs a little madness, or else... he never dares cut the rope and be free.

You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.

Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.

Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.

The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality.

Immortality—was electric-light slime reaching for the stars, and she stood poised on the brink, balanced on the razor-edge between life and death, the flickering and the eternal, the human and the immortal, sanity and the holy madness that was realer than sanity, more cogent, a path to oneness with the timeless infinite that could be hers if she had the courage to cast off her moorings to the shores of self and trust her fate to that all-forgiving sea.

A boom-and-bust pattern has been well chronicled since the publication of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in 1841. In it, Scottish author Charles Mackay probed the human tendency to run amok in pursuit of quick profits, dating back to a mania for tulip bulbs as expensive as houses in seventeenth-century Holland.

mad, were not my perception and reasonings so clear; and this state of mind appears to have brought with it superior knowledge on all subjects.