Quotes About Madness

In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too

Here at CBS, spring also means March Madness. I love the name March Madness. I'm glad the PC police haven't made us change March Madness to early spring psychosis.

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

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

Much Madness is divinest Sense -- To a discerning Eye -- Much Sense -- the starkest Madness -- 'Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail -- Assent -- and you are sane -- Demur -- you're straightway dangerous -- And handled with a Chain --

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.

Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures. -- from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius

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

It was a time of madness, the sort of mad-hysteria that always presages war. There seems to be nothing left but war--when any population in any sort of a nation gets violently angry, civilization falls down and religion forsakes its hold on the consciences of human kind in such times of public madness.

I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.

Actors, to a certain extent, never grow up, you see. It's an extension of being out in the back yard with a stick, only you're being paid to do it. It's borderline madness.

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

The point is it is amazing that the generations have joined in the Beatle madness and love the music. Who knew?

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

love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes under its tortures.

Madness is the result not of uncertainty but certainty.

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.

To hope for safety in flight, when you have turned away from the enemy the arms by which the body is defended, is indeed madness. In battle those who are most afraid are always in most danger; but courage is equivalent to rampart.

Madness is the acme of intelligence.

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.

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?

Every time I stepped into madness of the crowds, I longed for the wisdom of the loneliness.

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.

Drunkenness is nothing else but a voluntary madness.

The universe without music would be madness.

Crazy Love is crazy good! Leslie What's brain is evidently crowded with strangeness, awfulness, wonderfulness, wildness, madness of all kinds...and love. Lots of love. How lucky we are that her imagination runs deep, runs true, runs onto the page in crazily beautiful stories -- and lucky, so very lucky, to be holding those stories right now in our hands.

At one time I was so much involved in the religious bullshit that I used to go around calling myself a Christian Communist, but as Janov says, religion is legalised madness.

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.

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

Madness and genius are two sides to the same coin.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

You can't have a masterpiece without madness.

As the cat lapses into savagery by night, and barbarously explores the dark, so primal and titanic is a woman with the love madness.

In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.

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

When you can no longer differentiate between the insanity spewed onto the blank page, and the madness evident in the all-but shattered mirror...that's when you know you're doing it right.

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

Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spite of madness.

I struggle in these situations not to let my madness govern me, and to let the positive aspects of my character define my life.

With her eyes alone she could give this response, this absolutely erotic response, as if febrile waves were trembling there, pools of madness... something devouring that could lick a man all over like a flame, annihilate him, with a pleasure never known before.

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 have loved women even to madness, but I have always loved liberty better.

The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.

It began with one act of madness, and it ended with another. John Brown heard history's clock strike in the night and tried to hurry dawn along with gunfire; now John Wilkes Booth heard the clock strike, and he tried with gunfire to restore the darkness. Each man stood outside the human community, directed by voices the sane do not hear, and each kept history from going logically... The line from Harper's Ferry to Ford's Theater is a red thread binding the immense disorder of the Civil War into an irrational sort of coherence.

I'll give up this sort of touring madness certainly, but music-everything is based on music. No, I'll never stop my music.

Every human being should keep alive within them the sacred flame of madness, but should behave as a normal person.

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