Quotes About Madness

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.

Madness will push you anywhere it wants. It never tells you where you're going, or why. It tells you it doesn't matter. It persuades you. It dangles something sparkly before you, shimmering like that water patch on the road up ahead. You will drive until you find it, the treasure, the thing you most desire. You will never find it. Madness may mock you so long you will die of the search. Or it will tire of you, turn its back, oblivious as you go flying. The car is beside you, smoking, belly-up, still spinning its wheels.

To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.

Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied.

I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness”. Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poor thing, she’s crazy!” (Above all I would laugh at my own stupidity.) I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived would be mine and everyone else’s - my madness would not be an escape from “reality”.

Who made art history? Not the most reasonable people. The mad men did. If painting is the mirror of a time, it must be mad to have a true image of what that time is. To one madness we oppose another madness.

Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

If people want to criticize a performance, that I understand. I think that's important. What's going on with this industry now is crazy. That obsession with celebrity is madness. I try as hard as I can not to read that stuff. Because most of the time it's a bit... factual. And it's frustrating because it's not about what you're setting out to do as an actor.

The madness of mobs or the insolence of soldiers, or both, when too near to each other, occasion some mischief.

there must be a routine to life, a framework to hang life on. Routines were what kept you sane, gave you something to do at this moment and at that, definite places to go, positive things to do. Abandon it and that way madness lies.

Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.

Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty.

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.

Whoever had known sexual jealousy, that most destructive of emotions-and this would be so for men no less than women-had known madness and had now to know sympathy for someone who had been carried by jealousy this one terrible step too far, to murder.

I envied women with signature hair-dos, signature perfumes, signature sign-offs. Novelists who tell Vogue Magazine: “I can’t live without my Smythson notebook, Pomegranate Noir cologne by Jo Malone and Frette sheets”. In the grip of madness, materialism begins to look like an admirable belief system.

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.

Lust, that state commonly known as 'being in love,' is a kind of madness. It is a distortion of reality so remarkable that it should, by rights, enable most of us to understand the other forms of lunacy with the sympathy of fellow-sufferers. But, paradoxically, mad and suffering as one is, and the heat of the flame, few of us are glad as we feel that passion slip away No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all.

Drunkenness is nothing else but a voluntary madness.

In Lucretius, sexual desire is considered real and genuine, whereas love is illusory. Venus, the goddess who represents the power of sexual desire, is the font of love. She merely mocks lovers with mental images. Try as they might, lovers cannot satisfy themselves by gazing nor by rubbing against one another because the madness of love will always return; hence Lucretius' prescription to flee the mental images, that is, to ward off what feeds love, turning the mind elsewhere.

The universe without music would be madness.

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

In the madness, you have to find calm.

Anslinger's reefer madness did not caution even the seeds of efficient, intelligent, ruthless action ... The same goes for Hoover, sniveling Nixon, the whole miserable, wretchedly evil lot of them ... not a man among them who could have pulled off a successful coup in a banana republic.

I'm beginning to think that you should only be allowed to serve two terms, before madness sets in.

As adults we try to relax from the never-ending quest for reason and order by drinking a little whiskey or smoking whatever works for us, but the wisdom isn't in the whiskey or the smoke. The wisdom is in the moments when the madness slips away and we remember the basics.

We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.

He regarded himself as an accomplished writer — a clear sign of madness in anyone.

Every great genius has an admixture of madness.

You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.

Oh how the passions, insolent and strong, Bear our weak minds their rapid course along; Make us the madness of their will obey; Then die and leave us to our griefs as prey!

You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn.

'It is love and reason,' I said, 'fleeing from all this madness of war.'

Madness is a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.

The moon was gone, but to the magician's eyes the unicorn was the moon, cold and white and very old, lighting his way to safety, or to madness.

What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them.

I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured...with an informed and intelligent mind.

There is no genius without a mixture of madness.

Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.

As soon as reality breaks, as soon as we're separated from the phsical world, the cracks begin to appear in our minds. And through them seeps the madness that has always been there, flowing into your skull like a liquid nightmare.

Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.

On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty; only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther - the machine-gun is covering the square.

People were interesting at first. Then later, slowly but surely, all the flaws and madness would manifest themselves. I would become less and less to them; they would mean less and less to me.

the possession of power brings on madness.

Collective madness is called sanity.

On a street of right and wrong in every inch of sadness, rocks and tanks go hand in hand with madness.

Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip.

Clemenza's overriding responsibility is to his family. He takes a moment out of his routine madness to remember that he had promised his wife that he would bring dessert home. His instruction to his partner in crime is an entire moral manifesto in six little words: 'Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.

Certainly, Gandhi is not inferior to Christ in goodness and sanctity, and he surpasses him in touching humility. Gandhi is the prophet of hope in this age of pessimism and disillusionment. He is a promise of sanity in the madness induced by our world's heedless drinking at the fount of war.