Quotes About Madness

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.

If angels stoop from visions of more than earthly beauty to spells of less than earthly worth, they are but fallen angels, mingling divine utterances with the babblings of madness, and the madness is not the divineness.

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.

Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom.

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...

The sound of madness is life. It's waking up in the morning to your alarm clock, your kid crying for you, hearing the sound of the city, it's everything. Madness isn't necessarily a negative thing, it can be a positive thing. You know, hearing them cry for you, if you have children, is a great thing, it's your child.

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

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.

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.

If in madness of delusion, anyone shall lift his parricidal hand against this blessed union, the arms of thousands will be raised to save it, and the curse of millions will fall upon the head which may have plotted its destruction.

If God were to exist for the entire humanity, he would be profoundly vile, as he allows the existence of unfathomable sin, stupidity, madness, and misery for no reason than his own despicable enjoyment. God exists though, not for all humanity, but for a one chosen man - a philosopher - who is bound to answer the greatest philosophical question, the question about the nature of the questioner's existence, which progressively quenches the divine vanity.

I marvel with distress that in 2015 we are fighting the vaccination wars. It is deeply disturbing that people who should be able to weigh discredited so-called studies instead believe garbage, and so are willing to endanger their children and others. I sincerely hope this madness burns itself out before a lot more people get hurt.

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

He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! ... My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!

Madness such as this, its like trying to stop a fire with the moisture from a kiss

All those evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness have their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of children.

The New York fashion scene is crazy, madness, but I love the energy.

If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse. And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.

If the will, which in the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness,--a horrid thought!

If I want to live in a peaceful world, then it is up to me to make sure that I am a peaceful person. No matter how others behave, I keep peace in my heart. I declare peace in the midst of chaos or madness. I surround all difficult situations with peace and love.

Get yourself in that intense state of being next to madness. Keep yourself in, not necessarily a frenzied state, but in a state of great intensity. The kind of state you would be in before going to bed with your partner. That heightened state when you're in a carnal embrace: time stops and nothing else matters. You should always write with an erection. Even if you're a woman.

Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.

There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head... All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.

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.

People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.

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

Why is it, my shadow-striding friend, that we don't fear dreams? We lose consciousness, lose control, things happen with no apparent logic and abiding by no apparent rules.... We don't fear dreams, but we do fear madness, and death terrifies us.

I was on this boat in the middle of the ocean scuba diving for this film I did, and I was with actor Mackenzie Cook, who is in it as well, and I didn't have my phone on me. The producer of the film handed me over this phone and said "someone is on the phone for you Gemma," and here I am completely in all of the scuba gear on with the tank on, and a helmet. My agent just went "dum, dum, dum, dum"(hums Bond theme song), and I just knew then, and I went ahhhh madness, and I was over the moon.

Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.

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.

In my madness I was actually in love with her for the few hours it all lasted; it was the same unmistakable ache and stab across the mind, the same sighs, the same pain, and above all the same reluctance and fear to approach.

Drunkenness is nothing else but a voluntary madness.

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

Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

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.

What is sanity, after all, except the control of madness?

Alexander smoked and watched her from his tree stump bench. What are you doing? she would ask him. Nothing, he would reply. Nothing but growing my pain into madness.

Change may be the vitalizing wind blowing through the house of life, but it is not an abiding force. We need permanent things to soak peace into us as well as progress - the beauty of the earth, seedtime and harvest, the smiles of lovers, the joy of the young in being alive, pride in craftsmanship. Why, oh why must we let ourselves forget these lasting treasures in an age of consuming ambition, speed madness and accumulated goods that leave us no chance to live? If we cannot be contented with a little no wealth will ever satisfy us.

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.

Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances.

longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness

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

There's only one thing that can save a man from madness and that's uncertainty.

All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.

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.

Like madness, is the glory of this life.

Louis 'Thunder Thumbs' Johnson was one of the greatest bass players to ever pick up the instrument, as a member of the Brothers Johnson, we shared decades of magical times working together in the studio and touring the world. From my albums 'Body Heat' and 'Mellow Madness,' to their platinum albums 'Look Out for #1,' 'Right On Time,' 'Blam' and 'Light Up the Night,' which I produced, to Michael's solo debut 'Off the Wall,' I considered Louis a core member of my production team. He was a dear and beloved friend and brother, and I will miss his presence and joy of life every day.