Quotes About Madness

Art is a little bit larger than life - it's an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.

It's not knowing that drives you mad. It's imaging things that you wish you couldn't think up all by yourself.

To drive an F1 car you have to be a little mad. On the morning of a race there's a mix of excitement and fear. If it's a wet track, then it's worse as you're not in control most of the time, which is the thing all drivers fear the most.

As I've said before, I never understand why people ski down a slope to a bar and then go on a lift so they can ski down the same slope again. That's like walking to the pub on a Sunday, then going home and walking to the pub again. Madness.

The only difference between genius and insanity is that genius has its limits.

Impatience turns an ague into a fever, a fever to the plague, fear into despair, anger into rage, loss into madness, and sorrow to amazement.

But perhaps this is what normality is: a complex of dread and terror which compels the psyche to deny and restructure reality. Those who cannot ensconce themselves within social delusions either distort reality and hallucinate their own mirages, or they go mad.

But in many cases, the extension of standardized measurement may be of diminishing utility, or even counterproductive—sliding from sensible solutions to metric madness.

Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!

I simply don't think that putting every bit of energy I have into parenting-at the expense of my career, marriage and social life-will be the difference between Layla becoming homeless or the president. But too many women are made to believe that every tiny decision they make-from pacifiers to flash cards-will have a lasting impact on their child. It's a recipe for madness. It also reveals an overblown sense of self-importance.

Es ist eine tödliche Spannung, die wie ein schartiges Messer unser Rückenmark entlang kratzt. Die Beine wollen nicht mehr, die Hände zittern, der Körper ist eine dünne Haut über mühsam unterdrücktem Wahnsinn, über einem gleich hemmungslos ausbrechenden Gebrüll ohne Ende.

Night again. We are deadened by the strain—a deadly tension that scrapes along one's spine like a gapped knife. Our legs refuse to move, our hands tremble, our bodies are a thin skin stretched painfully over repressed madness, over an almost irresistible, bursting roar. We have neither flesh nor muscles any longer, we dare not look at one another for fear of some miscalculable thing. So we shut our teeth—it will end—it will end—perhaps we will come through.

We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out. Then the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that encircles us, we creep in upon ourselves, and with big eyes stare into the night. Our only comfort is the steady breathing of our comrades asleep, and thus we wait for the morning.

It keeps them going, staves off the evil day when they will be alone. And to be alone, really alone, without illusion, that way lies madness—and suicide.

Night again. We are deadened by the strain—a deadly tension that scrapes along one's spine like a gapped knife. Our legs refuse to move, our hands tremble, our bodies are thin stretched painfully over repressed madness, over an almost irresistible, bursting roar. We have neither flesh nor muscle any longer, we dare not look at one another for fear of some miscalculable thing. So we shut our teeth—it will end—it will end—perhaps we will come through.

The dark turns into madness. It rocks and rages. Dark things, darker than the night itself, rush upon us in great waves, over us and onwards.

crouching like cats we run on, overwhelmed by this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God only knows what devils; this wave that multiplies our strength with fear and madness and greed of life, seeking and fighting for nothing but our deliverance.

And at night, waking out of a dream, overwhelmed and bewitched by the crowding apparitions, a man perceives with alarm how slight is the support, how thin the boundary that divides him from the darkness. We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.

Nowhere have I had such lovely friends as in Germany," she wrote. "Looking back on it all is like seeing someone you love go mad—and do horrible things.

Insanity is hereditary. You can catch it from your kids.

Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.

Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams.

the characteristics the modern mind prides itself on are precisely those of madness.

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in turgenev