Quotes About Madness

... he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

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.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen forget.

It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in.

If he waits for the ideal moment, he will never set off; he requires a touch of madness to take the next step. The warrior uses that touch of madness. For - in both love and war - it is impossible to foresee everything.

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

We are in the final stages of egoic madness. Almost the whole world is fighting each other. We witnessed the final stages of egoic madness in the 20th century, and even now it still is playing itself out. It has not quite come to an end yet.

There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric... But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art - he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided the madness is given us by divine gift.

I wanted to see something in full daylight; I was sated with the pleasure and comfort of the half light; I had the same desire for the daylight as for water and air. And if seeing was fire, I required the plenitude of fire, and if seeing would infect me with madness, I madly wanted that madness.

So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.

I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself

Madness breeds madness.

You will certainly grant me that neither antiquity nor whatever nation has devised a more repulsive and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating your God. This is the most disgusting dogma of Christian religion, the greatest insult to the Highest Being, the climax of madness and insanity.

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.

They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.

If you look at the monkeys, you can learn many things about the men; if you look at the men, you can learn many things about the madness!

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.

For it is the working people who have their hands on the machinery. And only by stopping the machinery of destruction can we ever hope to stop this madness.

That was madness. You're never going to bring one of those down with a handgun.

There is no element of genius without some form of madness.

I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.

You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets.

Armed with madness, I go on a long voyage.

That poverty is no disaster is understood by everyone who has not yet succumbed to the madness of greed and luxury that turns everything topsy-turvy.

Forced to recognize our inhumanity, our reason coexists with our insanity. And though we choose between reality and madness, it's either sadness or euphoria.

He wanted to make her laugh. He wanted to sit and listen to her talk about books until his ears fell off. But all these were things he could not want, because they were things he could not have, and wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness.

The different sorts of madness are innumerable.

Get yourself in that extreme state of being next to madness. You should always write with an erection. Even if you're a woman.

To philosopher and historian the madness and imbecile wickedness of mankind ought to appear ordinary events.

He who without the Muse's madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.

To dig our heels in and say no to a present madness is a good thing, but to walk a new path and say yes is a better thing.

Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?

Our moment had passed somehow. I was different. He was, too. Without our “madness” to unite us, there wasn’t anything much there. Or maybe too much had happened in too short a time. It’s like when you take a trip with someone you don’t know very well. Sometimes you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realise all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travellers, if that makes any sense.

It is madness beyond compare To try to reform the world.

What's your specialty? Oh, you know. Madness. Mayhem. Debauchery. And even with all that going for me, I can still make a mean mojito.

The universe without music would be madness.

Weakness ever sympathizes with vice, because vice is a weakness which assumes the mask of strength. Madness holds reason in horror, and on all subjects it delights in the exaggerations of falsehood. The cause of all bewitchments, the poison of all philtres, the power of all sorcerers are there.

What madness is this, inviting sable Death by warfare? It always hovers close and comes unforeseen on silent steps.

This ego has all the desires, ambitions, wants to be always on the top of everything. You are exploited by this ego. And this never allows you even a glimpse of your real authentic self, and your life is there, in your authenticity. Hence, this ego only produces misery, suffering, fighting, frustration, madness, suicide, murder - all kinds of crime.

Madness and genius are two sides to the same coin.

It is madness and a contradiction to expect that things which were never yet performed should be effected, except by means hitherto untried.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

Nature has no cure for this sort of madness, though I have known a legacy from a rich relative work wonders.

Love is a madness. Love is Failer - Durzo Blint

To me avarice seems not so much a vice as a deplorable piece of madness.

Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there were many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, and it did now, too.