Quotes About Madness

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is linked to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.

Awareness is the enemy of sanity, for once you hear the screaming, it never stops.

A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King.

Much Madness is divinest Sense—To a discerning Eye—Much Sense—the starkest Madness—'Tis the MajorityIn this, as All, prevail—Assent—and you are sane—Demur—you're straightway dangerous—And handled with a Chain.

We have seen the immediate effect of the first exposition of the evangelical theory of faith. When applied to the case of the morbidly-despairing sinner, that theory has one argumentative imperfection which the logical sharpness of madness will soon discover and point out. The simple reply is: "I do not feel the faith which you describe. I wish I could feel it; but it is no use trying to conceal the fact, I am conscious of nothing like it."

One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad.

Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.

Madness that is so nearly allied to genius can know no cure in this world.

Everything that had happened was shockingly beautiful, enough to make you crazy.

He had to treat him as the maniac he obviously was. The fact that his insanity was dressed in religious trappings meant nothing.

April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I'm nuts.

Ageing, slightly mad and on the threshold of retirement, it was an uneasy combination and it was no wonder that people shied away from her or made only the most perfunctory remarks. It was difficult to imagine what her retirement would be like—impossibe and rather gruesome to speculate on it.

Mark Twain had written somewhere: We are all mad at night.

Owing to the disabilities of the two major sovereigns, one incapacitated by alcohol and the other by insanity, the result was not what it might have been. Renewed madness was already darkening Charles's mind when he arrived and in the brief intervals when he was lucid, Wenceslas was drunk.

I believe in love and lust and sex and romance. I don't want everything to add up to some perfect equation. I want mess and chaos. I want someone to go crazy out of his mind for me. I want to feel passion and heat and sweat and madness. I want valenties and cupids and all of that crap. I WANT IT ALL

Ox, what occupation is most closely linked to insanity?' 'Emperor,' I said promptly.

The age is mad and talks nonsense in all areas, but above all where art is concerned, because of the heretical confusion between good and beauty. Everyone who seeks the pure ideal where art is concerned is regarded as a heretic in the eyes of the Muse and of art. So I'll speak of the idealist painters as if they were ill; sometimes they reveal genius, but it is a genius that is ailing.

We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.

I think we all have madness in us, it's just that I've realized mine and found a way to let it out.

All I'm doing is rearranging the curtains in the insane asylum.

While the world may feel entitled and have the power to pronounce an individual crazy, are there times when the innocent genius, the insightful individual or just the old grandmother may reasonably declare the world to be mad? Probably, but what hope or happiness would such an individual have?

When my business partner Rob Smethurst rang me up and said he wanted to rebuild the club as Macclesfield FC, and to bring me on board as his director of football operations, I thought he was mad.

There's not many people that can handle my sheer madness.