Quotes About Madness

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.

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.

Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.

That in you which recognizes madness as madness (even if it is your own) is sanity, is the arising awareness, is the end of insanity.

The typhoon came out of the sea first as a deep hollow roar. ... I was surrounded by the madness, the unreason, of uncontrolled, undisciplined energy. None of this made any sense. It was worse than useless - it was nature destroying its own creation - its own self. To create by the long process of growth and then to destroy by a fit of wild emotion - was this not madness, was this not unreason?

Madness is not enlightenment, but the search for enlightenment is often mistaken for madness.

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

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

He knew that Hop-Frog was not fond of wine; for it excited the poor cripple almost to madness; and madness is no comfortable feeling.

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

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.

Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.

I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.

But what is madness, if not being able to control your own mind?

Anger, the Stoics said, was a short madness.

I’ll play Pretty Pretty Princess with you if you just let me watch a little bit of March Madness.

The whole society depends on creating ambition in you. Ambition means a conflict, ambition means that whatsoever you are, you are wrong - you have to be somewhere else. Wherever you are, you are wrong - you have to be somewhere else. A constant madness to be somewhere else, to be somebody else, is what ambition is.

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.

The madness of love can always be suspended--to cook dinner or catch a plane, for instance.

The first sip [of tea] is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.

Granted that every war is madness-civil war, fratricide, is the worst of all; it reaches deeper into ugliness, cruelty and absurdity.

Ivan and Misha is the great American Russian Novel told as Chekhov would tell it, in stories of delicacy, humanity, and insight. From Kiev to Manhattan, Brighton Beach and Bellevue, Michael Alenyikov lays out a series of compelling arguments for brotherhood between brothers, between lovers, between men from an old country. Alenyikov confronts big subjects—illness and madness, sex and love in the age of AIDS, old and new world values, a fallen wall, the metaphysics of survival, the march of generations.

It is madness to risk losing what you need in pursuing what you simply desire.

Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. When it comes down to it, I let them think what they want. If they care enough to bother with what I do, then I'm already better than them anyways.

I think fame and all that madness, people taking your pictures all the time, drives me insane. It's a catch 22...the more they take pictures of you, the more upset you get by it and the more crazy you look and the more pictures they take of you. I think it's disgusting what's happened with that kind of celebrity culture right now.

Not to be mad is another form of madness

And yet, just as our body would burst asunder if the pressure of the atmosphere were removed from it, so would the arrogance of men expand, if not to the point of bursting then to that of the most unbridled folly, indeed madness, if the pressure of want, toil, calamity and frustration were removed from their life. One can even say that we require at all times a certain quantity of care or sorrow or want, as a ship requires ballast, in order to keep on a straight course.

You never undertake a project because you think other people will like it - because that way lies madness - but rather because you believe in it.

Let us be separated by wars and pestilence, death, madness but not by the passing of time.

I love writing and photography and the natural world that inspires them both. I'm working on getting as lost as I can in the beauty before it is completely wiped clean by the madness of man.

I don't think you can rely on Iran. I don't think you can rely on other radicals like the Taliban. They dispatched Al Qaida to bomb New York and Washington. What were they thinking? Were they that stupid? They weren't stupid. There is an irrationality there, and there is madness in this method.

I've always felt that there's a very thin membrane between madness and alcoholism, and/or destitution and being an OK American guy in a comfortable heated apartment with meatballs and a decent Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge.

The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.

Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.

... there is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete, and everyone is capable of everything.

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

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria or your own unfeminine inadequacy. Women have learned to submit to pain by hearing authority figures - doctors, priests, psychiatrists - tell us that what we feel is not pain.

I'm the one who steps from the shadows, all trenchcoat and cigarette and arrogance, ready to deal with the madness. Oh, I've got it all sewn up. I can save you. If it takes the last drop of your blood, I'll drive your demons away. I'll kick them in the bollocks and spit on them when they're down and then I'll be gone back into darkness, leaving only a nod and a wink and a wisecrack. I walk my path alone... who would walk with me?

I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh.

It would be madness to let the purposes or the methods of private enterprise set the habits of the age of atomic energy.

If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us. --"The Content of the Psychoses

What madness it is for a man to starve himself to enrich his heir, and so turn a friend into an enemy! For his joy at your death will be proportioned to what you leave him.

There is always some madness in love.

Between madness and sanity, there is a shifting boundary. It is impossible to explain. Time slows down and you have to try to fill it. You don't have anything but solitude.

But to deny fate is arrogance, to declare that we are the sole shapers of our existence is madness;if you deny fate life becomes the series of missed opportunities, a regret for what never was and could have been, a remorse of what was not done and could have been done, and the present is wasted, twisted into another missed oppurtunity.