quotations about madness
Is it so far from madness to wisdom?
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A Game of Thrones
In our society madness has come to mean mental illness. Mental illness is a dehumanizing label used to justify the social control through psychiatric intervention of troublesome or troubled individuals, who have not violated any laws and therefore cannot be criminally prosecuted and imprisoned, but whose ideas and actions, values and life styles, threaten established power relationships or society in general.
LEONARD FRANK
Madness Network News: A Journal of the Psychiatric Survivor Movement
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
First sign of madness, talking to your own head.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Madness is not ours alone, but part of the human condition; we cannot segregate it over there apart from our own lives.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity
Madness is not real; what is real is audiences' response to and labeling of certain actors and behaviors as "mad."
CAROL A. B. WARREN
Court of Last Resort: Mental Illness and the Law
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
I am not mad; I would to heaven I were!
For then, 'tis like I should forget myself.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King John
And men, whose reason long was blind,
From cells of madness unconfined,
Oft lose whole years of darker mind.
ALFRED TENNYSON
The Two Voices
When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
There are so many kinds of madness, so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is so. Yes. A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us--but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and we go insane.
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
"The Case of Beauvais", Back to God's Country and Other Stories
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
The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
preface, Madness and Civilization
In short, herein seems to lie the difference between idiots and madmen, that madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them: but idiots make very few or no propositions, and reason scarce at all.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Go, madman! rush over the wildest Alps, that you may please children and be made the subject of declamation.
JUVENAL
Satires
Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO & CHUCK HOGAN
The Fall
Madness is traumatic; it tears us from our familiar self, leaving a gap so big that it threatens us with no return once we fall into it. Trauma brings its own vocabulary, which we learn bit by bit in the aftermath of the shocking event that instigates it.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity
Anger is a brief madness.
HORACE
Epistles