Popular quotes about Madness! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 96
Swords have been my life, not books. But every child knows that the Targaryens have always danced too close to madness. Your father was not the first. King Jaehaerys once told me that madness and greatness are two sides of the same coin. Every time a new Targaryen is born, he said, the gods toss the coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.
George R. R. MartinIf 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.
Andrew JacksonFor 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.
SophoclesJem is nothing but goodness. That he struck you last night only shows how capable you are of driving even saints to madness.
Cassandra ClareGive not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.
Herman MelvilleGet 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.
Tom RobbinsI've got a quote for you, a good quote to describe Television...In madness there is order.
Tom VerlaineI believe I am quite amiable and affable and quite fair, and I've rarely worked with people who are the opposite. Moodiness scares me. What gets to me is unkindness. Madness. Unwarranted cruelty through words. People who scream and shout at work. I hate confrontation and violence. I've done it in the past and I don't want to do it again. I guess I want a perfect world.
Anthony HopkinsAnd have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? --now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
Edgar Allan PoeOnce in a mental hospital, a person grows used to the freedom that exists in the world of madness and becomes addicted to it. You no longer have to take on responsibilities, to struggle to earn your daily bread, to be bothered with repetitive, mundane tasks. You could spend hours looking at a picture or making absurd doodles. Everything is torelated because, after all, the person is mentally ill.
Paulo CoelhoIn Lucretius, sexual desire is considered real and genuine, whereas love is illusory. Venus, the goddess who represents the power of sexual desire, is the font of love. She merely mocks lovers with mental images. Try as they might, lovers cannot satisfy themselves by gazing nor by rubbing against one another because the madness of love will always return; hence Lucretius' prescription to flee the mental images, that is, to ward off what feeds love, turning the mind elsewhere.
Paul Ludwig LandsbergI 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.
Mother TeresaOne 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.
Fay WeldonWhen I came out to Hollywood, I discovered the perfect place for my creative madness - Cannon Pictures.
Mario Van PeeblesArt will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.
Magdalena AbakanowiczImperfection 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.
MarilynI 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.
Allen GinsbergAs the cat lapses into savagery by night, and barbarously explores the dark, so primal and titanic is a woman with the love madness.
Gelett BurgessI think that dwelling on other people's perception of you is the road to complete madness, unfortunately. I try and resist that.
Kate BeckinsaleI would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia.
John Forbes NashZaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.
Douglas AdamsA 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.
George SantayanaRead for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition... and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.
Adam ZagajewskiOne of my favourite contemporary fiction writers is a Texan, Ben Fountain. His extraordinary novel, Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk, all takes place within the half-time show at a Dallas Cowboys football game. No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush's Iraq War.
Adam HochschildWhen you complain, you make yourself a victim. Leave the situation, change the situation or accept it, all else is madness.
Eckhart TollePeople were interesting at first. Then later, slowly but surely, all the flaws and madness would manifest themselves. I would become less and less to them; they would mean less and less to me.
Charles BukowskiPain 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.
Naomi WolfThe multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacity, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also with its madness and frenzy.
Jean BaudrillardThere are men from whom nature or some peculiar destiny has removed the cover beneath which we hide our own madness. They are likethin-skinned insects whose visible play of muscles seem to make them deformed, though in fact, everything soon turns to its normal shape again.
E. T. A. HoffmannOn a street of right and wrong in every inch of sadness, rocks and tanks go hand in hand with madness.
Elton JohnIt's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.
Fernando PessoaCertainly, Gandhi is not inferior to Christ in goodness and sanctity, and he surpasses him in touching humility. Gandhi is the prophet of hope in this age of pessimism and disillusionment. He is a promise of sanity in the madness induced by our world's heedless drinking at the fount of war.
Sudhir KakarUp is down, pleasure is pain, darkness is light, slavery is freedom, madness is sanity.
Anton Szandor LaVeyBut love, like wine, gives a tumultuous bliss, Heighten'd indeed beyond all mortal pleasures; But mingles pangs and madness in the bowl.
Edward YoungIf there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale
John Kenneth GalbraithIf an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue?
Martin Luther King, Jr....but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.
Laurie R. KingThe point is... to live one's life in the full complexity of what one is, which is something much darker, more contradictory, more of a maelstrom of impulses and passions, of cruelty, ecstacy, and madness, than is apparent to the civilized being who glides on the surface and fits smoothly into the world.
Thomas NagelBut 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.
Oriana Fallaci