Quotes About Madness

... 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.

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.

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.

Each sex has a relation to madness. Every desire has a relation to madness. But it would seem that one desire has been taken as wisdom, moderation, truth, leaving to the other sex the weight of a madness that cannot be acknowledged or accommodated.

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.

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 a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness... It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

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.

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

It takes madness to find out madness.

For every nation that lives peaceably, there will be many others to grow hard and push their arrogance to extremes; the gods attend to these things slowly. But they attend to those who put off God and turn to madness.

It was a good speech, but the reaction was due to the fact that politics are madness, and even if one does not know it, a country in electoral season experiences flares of lunacy like the great storms that sometimes march across the golden surface of the sun.

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.

Books have led some to learning and others to madness.

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 idea of excessive diversification is madness. Wide diversification, which necessarily includes investment in mediocre businesses, only guarantees ordinary results.

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.

They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us.

I don't carry the burden of the past or the madness of the future. I live in the present.

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

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

One friend dies and we remain indifferent; another dies, perhaps less intimate, and we see ourselves as dead, and weep, mourn, tear our hair or find ourselves caught up in the madness of the wake, competing with others as to who was closest, now suffers most.

The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness.

The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us,...The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being's difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.

I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.

Somebody had tipped the American continent like a pinball machine and all the goofballs had come rolling to LA in the southwest corner. I cried for all of us. There was no end to the American sadness and the American madness. Someday we'll all start laughing and roll on the ground when we realize how funny it's been.

Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.

Love is a madness. Love is Failer - Durzo Blint

What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?

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

To me avarice seems not so much a vice as a deplorable piece of madness.

Every great genius has an admixture 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.

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

Not only is America a country where torture is now policy. It's now outsourced. It's given to companies at a cost-plus basis. It's a triple whammy of surreal, absolute madness.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

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.

When you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change the situation or accept it, all else is madness.

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.

In my view, madness is a place. You go. You come back. And I think we all take turns being the mental patient. Without a touch of crazy, literature can be a desolate place. In the current climate of careful speech, even fearful speech, smoke-free film scripts, thought-free songs, and child-proof locks on American minds, the oft-repeated lament of the arts is "Where have all those wonderful madmen gone?"

I watched them carefully, as always, searching for a sign of mental weakness. But there was none. Every man was coping well with the hardship, each one of them locked into his task. But it is one thing to practice, and quite another to race. And the trouble is, you never know who, on the day, will find it within his soul to give more than he has ever given before. It takes a kind of madness to compete like that, because of the will power and the ego, and his loyalty. And while some men have it, others have yet to find it. And a coach can only use his best judgement as to who those men will be.

If I had my way...We would lock ourselves away from that madness out there.

You can't complain about the pressures, the paparazzi, the madness. Because that is the job. I've always understood that's the deal.

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.

Interestingly enough, for me, a character like Captain Jack, you feel like you could just continue. The possibilities are endless and limitless. There is any possibility of madness and absurdity that could commence, so you feel that, with this character, you're never really done.

In Les Mots I explain the origin of my madness, of my neurosis. This analysis may help the young who dream of writing.

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.