quotations about madness
Madness is something rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
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
To expect an impossibility is madness.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Madness is like gravity--all you need is a little push.
JONATHAN & CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
The Dark Knight
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
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
Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"On the Classics", Selected Essays
Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified.
SUSANNA KAYSEN
Girl, Interrupted
Is it so far from madness to wisdom?
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A Game of Thrones
Sanity brings pain
but madness is a vile thing.
EURIPIDES
Hippolytus
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
I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
DON DELILLO
The Names
I am not mad; I would to heaven I were!
For then, 'tis like I should forget myself.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King John
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
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
You have made the terrible mistake of seeing things as they should be and not as they are--that makes you a very sane madman.
TERRY WALSTROM
The Monorails of Mars
It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.
THOMAS MOORE
Care of the Soul