Quotes About Madness

Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings... the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art... So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense... madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.

... 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.

Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.

There is a madness, yes, this is true. Few mortals possess it, the willingness to step away from the protection of sanity. To walk into the wild wood of madness...

Madness is the first step towards unselfishness. Be mad and tell us what is behind the veil of "sanity". The purpose of life is to bring us closer to those secrets, and madness is the only means.

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.

Many a man is mad in certain instances, and goes through life without having it perceived. For example, a madness has seized a person of supposing himself obliged literally to pray continually; had the madness turned the opposite way, and the person thought it a crime ever to pray, it might not improbably have continued unobserved.

Let the mad find wisdom in their madness for the sane, and let the sane be grateful.

Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.

Backstage at the Victoria's Secret show is pure madness. Big personalities, big hair, and tons of press.

Avoiding problems doesn't make them go away - you think it does, but it really doesn't. They're just postponed. Those problems just stay inside your subconscious and brew until your body gets to a point where it's had enough and decides to release some of the stress itself. That's what an anxiety attack is! It happens when you don't know how to vent your frustration, fears, stress, sadness, madness, whatever it is that bothers you, the things you should be confronting and getting closure with. If you don't confront these things and deal with them, your body does it for you.

Jem is nothing but goodness. That he struck you last night only shows how capable you are of driving even saints to madness.

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

With madness, as with vomit, it's the passerby who receives the inconvenience.

Explore the internet long enough and you'll see completely balls out madness there.

Life is a green madness just now, trying to squeeze the last bit of warmth from the season.

It'll be your own torture," he said, serious. "I hope to God it'll torture you to madness.

A great deal of phenomenal experience has fostered in me a flexibility of the mind and imagination that some might call madness

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.

Apophenia means finding pattern or meaning where others don’t. Feelings of revelation and ecstasies usually accompany it. It has some negative connotations in psychological terminology when it implies finding meaning or pattern where none exists; and some positive ones when it implies finding something important, useful or beautiful. It thus links creativity and psychosis, genius and madness.

I am surrounded by flatterers and fools. It can drive a man to madness,.. . Half of them don’t dare tell me the truth, and the other half can’t find it.

People think there is something wrong with Mike(Milbury). But there's method in his madness.

The essence of greatness is the ability to choose personal fulfillment in circumstances where others choose madness.

Racing and hunting excite man's heart to madness.

I once picked up a woman from a garbage dump and she was burning with fever; she was in her last days and her only lament was: My son did this to me. I begged her: You must forgive your son. In a moment of madness, when he was not himself, he did a thing he regrets. Be a mother to him, forgive him. It took me a long time to make her say: I forgive my son. Just before she died in my arms, she was able to say that with a real forgiveness. She was not concerned that she was dying. The breaking of the heart was that her son did not want her. This is something you and I can understand.

When I came out to Hollywood, I discovered the perfect place for my creative madness - Cannon Pictures.

When love is not madness, it is not love.

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King.

I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them - children, duties, visits, bores, relations - the things that protect married people from each other.

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.

[His mind] was like a volcano, full of fire and wealth, sometimes calm, often dazzling and playful, but ever threatening. It ran swift as the lightning from one subject to another, and occasionally burst forth in passionate throes of intellect, nearly allied to madness.

The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.

The U.S. has become the most egregious war-monger and terrorist nation in the world, as well as the long-time leading purveyor of weapons of war throughout the world, and because here at home, we have 50 million of our citizens living in poverty, one in four children surviving on Food Stamps, a collapsing education system, poor health care, and many other disasters, none of which can be addressed as long as the country keeps pouring trillions of dollars into war and militarism. This madness and criminality must end!

Things are both getting better and getting worse. The madness is accelerating but an acceleration of the new consciousness is also coming in. However, this latter development is less apparent when you listen to the media. The media still mostly reflects what is happening in the sphere of the old consciousness.

madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom

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

Just as it would be madness to settle on medical treatment for the body of a person by taking an opinion poll of the neighbors, so it is irrational to prescribe for the body politic by polling the opinions of the people at large.

Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and is lending oneself to the universal illusion without becoming its dupe.

Afflicted by love's madness all are blind.

Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.

I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.

I would be remiss, as a scientist who studied this, if I didn't mention the following two things: The first is that, most importantly, we need to do, as a society, in this country and globally, whatever we can to reduce population"....."Our whole economic system is based on growth, and growth of our population, and this economic madness has to end.

I think it's probably a good thing to be considered stable, but with a capacity for madness.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

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.