quotations about madness
Why is it that madness holds such a fascination to human societies the world over? What is it about the "imbalance" of those afflicted that spurs us on to write about, paint, dramatize and immortalize in our legends caricatures of suffering people?
JONATHAN BURNS
The Descent of Madness: Evolutionary Origins of Psychosis and the Social Brain
Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Letters
Madness hath imaginary bliss, and most men have no more.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
Trying to speak and write about madness induces its felt impact: words slip, slide, and break, fall into nowhere. Disorder defeats any clear line of exposition. Like a spell or a fog or pollen in the air, to speak of madness is to be infiltrated by experiences of its derangement that we both know and deny.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity
We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind
To suffer with the body.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
Sanity brings pain
but madness is a vile thing.
EURIPIDES
Hippolytus
I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.
MARYA HORNBACHER
Madness: A Bipolar Life
The language of madness is thus marked by privacy, immediacy, and soliloquy -- what appears on the outside as either silence or delirium.
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
Hegel's Theory of Madness
One knows one's madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
The idea that madness is an illness affecting the mind is merely a recognition of the objective reality that it has always had. Earlier ideas that the mad were filled with a god, diabolically possessed, had chosen to embrace unreason, and so forth, were merely mistakes that have been replaced by our scientific discovery that madness is actually mental illness.
GARY GUTTING
Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason
Is it so far from madness to wisdom?
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A Game of Thrones
I don't know what it is with the mad, but they've certainly got force of will. Maybe it's not having the checks and balances the rest of us have, or perhaps I'm kidding myself: maybe their minds are simply clearer, unclouded with the anxieties and morality that the rest of us are swaddled with. Perhaps they have the courage to point their magical thinking at the stars.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified.
SUSANNA KAYSEN
Girl, Interrupted
Anger is a brief madness.
HORACE
Epistles
Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.
R. D. LAING
"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness.... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
EMIL CIORAN
On the Heights of Despair
Madness is when the highs are too high and the lows are too low.
CAROL SAFER
"The Madwoman on the Streets", Madness Network News: A Journal of the Psychiatric Survivor Movement