Quotes About Madness

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.

As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad . . .

O existenta care nu ascunde o mare nebunie n-are nicio valoare.

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.

When you meditate all day on the inopportuneness of birth, everything you plan and everything you perform seems pathetic, futile. You are like a madman who, cured, does nothing but think of the crisis from which he has emerged, the "dream" he has left behind; he keeps harking back to it, so that his cure is of no benefit to him whatever.

De ce un nebun vede mai mult? Fiindca nebunia-i suferinta.

When the habit of seeing things as they are turns into a mania, we lament the madman we have been and are no longer.

E drept c? mai mult de atât ce ar putea fi Urâtul? Un iad ce nu st? în putinÈ›a Diavolului s?-l imagineze, dar pe care-l elaboreaz? cu grij? ucigaÈ™a demen?? lucid? a c?rnii.

Nebunia veget?rii f?r? nici un scop distruge pân? la urm? ÅŸi iluziile erotice.

Nu exist? salvare prin nebunie, fiindc? nu exist? om cu presentimentul nebuniei care s? nu se team? de lucidit??ile eventuale într-o asemenea stare. Ai vrea haosul, dar È›i-e fric? de luminile din el.

In the 'Gospel According to the Egyptians,' Jesus proclaims: 'Men will be the victims of death so long as women give birth.' And he specifies: 'I am come to destroy the works of woman.' When we frequent the extreme truths of the Gnostics, we should like to go, if possible, still further, to say something never said, which petrifies or pulverizes history, something out of a cosmic Neronianism, out of a madness on the scale of matter.

What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.

German endurance knows no limits — even in madness: Nietzsche endured his eleven years, Hölderlin forty.

Saintliness is a special kind of madness. While the madness of mortals exhausts itself in useless and fantastic actions, holy madness is a conscious effort towards winning everything.

All great events have been set in motion by madmen, by mediocre madmen. Which will be true, we may be sure, of the "end of the world" itself.

To be something – unconditional – is always a form of madness from which life – flower of fixed ideas – frees itself only to fade.

When we have exhausted the pretexts which incite us to gaiety or melancholy, we come to the point of experiencing either one in a pure state: which is how we join the mad ...

Life seems good only to the madman

Che umiliazione dover assistere all'estinzione dei nostri deliri! Dov'è il folle che ero?

So long as man is protected by madness, he functions and flourishes; but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.

reality" falls within the province of lunacy.

Ambition is a drug that turns it's addicts into potential madmen.

The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion...one would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.