91 Madness Quotes

Maybe that's what Hell is. You go mad. And all your demons come and get you just as fast as you can think them up.

Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction - it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.

The wisest among us is very lucky never to have met the woman, be she beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, who could drive him crazy enough to be fit to be put into an asylum.

When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim's body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.

Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to Counsel It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.

Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.

It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad.

As I am never better than when I am mad; then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there's the torment, there's the hell.

Grant me an old man's frenzy, Myself must I remake Till I am Timon and Lear Or that William Blake Who beat upon the wall Till Truth obeyed his call.

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?

I can't dislike you, but I will say this to you: you haven't got long before you are all going to kill yourselves, because you are all crazy. And you can project it back at me ... but I am only what lives inside each and every one of you.

'Villains!' I shrieked, 'dissemble no more! I admit the deed! - tear up the planks! - here, here! - it is the beating of his hideous heart!'

How strange to have failed as a social creature-even criminals do not fail that way-they are the law's 'Loyal Opposition,' so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.

I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

The great Gaels of Ireland Are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, And all their songs are sad.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. ... I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I'm so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower. Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I'm so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice! And you tell Mr. Harding right back - he puts both hands on the table and leans down, his voice getting low - that I'm so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November.

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

When you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.

And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him. (1455a33)

Mr. and Mrs. America - you are wrong. I am not the king of the jews nor am I a hippie cult leader. I am what you have made of me and the mad dog devil killer fiend leper is a reflection of your society. . . Whatever the outcome of this madness that you call a fair trial or Christian justice, you can know this: In my mind's eye my thoughts light fires in your cities.

TRUE! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?

For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not - and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.

One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fiber of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

Outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals.

For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, 'Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.' Thus I became a madman. And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

Why is it when we talk to God we're said to be praying - but when God talks to us, we're said to be schizophrenic?

...years of insanity have made this guy crazy!

All passion is lost now. The world is mediocre, limp, without force. And madness and despair are a force. And force is a crime in the eyes of the fools, the weak and the silly who rule the roost. You are mediocre. Verloc, whose affair the police has managed to smother so nicely, was mediocre. And the police murdered him. He was mediocre. Everybody is mediocre. Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world. Ossipon, you have my cordial scorn. You are incapable of conceiving even what the fat-fed citizen would call a crime. You have no force.

When people ask me where I get my imagination, I simply lament, 'God, here and there, makes madness a calling.'

Nous avons psychologise comme les fous, qui augmentent leur folie en s'efforcant de la comprendre.

Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen -; although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature.

If you still think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.

Let us speak of our madness. We are always being called mad. If we are mad - we and our brothers in America who are walking hand in hand with us in the vanguard of progress - at least we are mad in company with most of our great predecessors and all the most intelligent foreigners. Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner, Shelley, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth were all mad in turn. We shall be proud to join them in the Asylum to which they are now consigned.

The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.

Still prowling around. Mid-afternoon. Guts rattling. Beginning to rain now. Notre-Dame rises tomb-like from the water. The gargoyles lean far out over the lace facade. They hang there like an idee fixe in the mind of a monomaniac. An old man with yellow whiskers approaches me. Has some Jaworski nonsense in his hand. Comes up to me with his head thrown back and the rain splashing in his face turns the golden sands to mud.

To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian, or to the accusation of immorality brought by the public prosecutor.

Prentice: I'm not mad. It only looks that way. Rance: Your actions today would get the Archbishop of Canterbury declared non-compos. Prentice: I'm not the Archbishop of Canterbury. Rance: That will come at a later stage of your illness.

Oh, I agree he went mad in the end. It is the only explanation. Something must have snapped in that fine brain, and he saw the little bit more which we call madness. Thank God, you and I are prosaic fellows...

I think you're all completely mad! -and thank you very much.

Damn, what a sorry-looking outfit. You boys don't look so crazy to me.

The occasional trip into realms labeled madness - can mean, especially if you are a writer, that you are given to telling the unvarnished, brutal, searing truth, whether society likes it or not. And not the Sylvia Plath look-at-me kinds of truth, but the spiritual-seer and mad-shaman types of truth, the truths that really hurt, the truths that get into society's craw and stick there, causing festering metaphysical sores indicative of social cancers or worse - but also the types of truth that speak to you deeply, authentically, radiantly, if you have the courage to listen.

What Elizabethan playwrights learned from the Greek classics was not theories of insanity, but dramatic practice - that is, madness is a dandy theatrical element. It focuses the audience's attention and increases suspense, since you never know what a mad person may get up to next; and Shakespeare himself makes use of it in many forms. In King Lear, there's a scene in which one man pretending to be mad, another who has really gone mad, and a third who has probably always been a little addled, are brought together for purposes of comparison, irony, pathos, and tour de force acting. In Hamlet, there are two variations - Hamlet himself, who assumes madness, and Ophelia, who really does go winsomely bonkers. In MacBeth, it's Lady MacBeth who snaps.

'Kant ought to be arrested and given three years in Solovki asylum for that 'proof' of his!' Ivan Nikolayich burst out completely unexpectedly. 'Ivan!' whispered Berlioz, embarrassed. But the suggestion to pack Kant off to an asylum not only did not surprise the stranger but actually delighted him. 'Exactly, exactly!' he cried and his green left eye, turned on Berlioz glittered. 'That's exactly the place for him! I said to him myself that morning at breakfast: 'If you'll forgive me, professor, your theory is no good. It may be clever but it's horribly incomprehensible. People will think you're mad.'' Berlioz's eyes bulged. At breakfast...to Kant?

Inhuman solitude made of sand and God. Surely only two kinds of people can bear to live in such desert: lunatics and prophets. The mind topples here not from fright but from sacred awe; sometimes it collapses downward, losing human stability, sometimes it springs upward, enters heaven, sees God face to face, touches the hem of His blazing garment without being burned, hears what He says, and taking this, slings it into men's consciousness. Only in the desert do we see the birth of these fierce, indomitable souls who rise up in rebellion even against God himself and stand before Him fearlessly, their minds in resplendent consubstantiality with the skirts of the Lord. God sees them and is proud, because in them his breath has not vented its force; in them, God has not stooped to becoming a man.

Have I lost my mind? Or have I, finally, found my heart?

I will have shepherds for my philosophers, Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night Watching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep. And I'll have lunatics For my poets, strolling from farm to farm, wild liars distorting The country news into supernaturalism - For all men to such minds are devils or gods - and that increases Man's dignity, man's importance, necessary lies Best told by fools.

The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.[2]

The Deftmenes are mad and the Dumii are sane, thought Snibril, and that's just the same as being mad except that it's quieter. If only you could mix them together, you'd end up with normal people.

He who loves the law dies either mad or poor.

'I know everyone will say 'Nijinsky has gone mad', but I don't care because I have already played the mad man at home. That is what everyone will think, but they won't put me in an insane asylum because I dance very well and give money to anyone who asks. People like eccentrics, so they will leave me alone and say I'm a mad clown. I like the mentally ill because I know how to talk to them. When my brother was in an insane asylum, I loved him and he could feel me. His friends liked me. I was eighteen then. I understood the life of a mentally ill person.'

Now I think I know what you tried to say to me How you suffered for you sanity How you tried to set them free They would not listen they're not listening still... Perhaps they never will...

Hermann went out of his mind, and is now confined in room Number 17 of the Obukhov Hospital. He never answers any questions, but he constantly mutters with unusual rapidity: 'Three, seven, ace!' 'Three, seven, queen!'

When everybody thinks you are nuts you finally just give into their pressure and go nuts.

His madness keeps him sane.

The world of madness is a lot bigger than the world of sane,

Mostpeople have been heard screaming for international measures that render hell rational -i thank heaven somebody's crazy enough to give me a daisy

I have sometimes amused myself by endeavouring to fancy what would be the fate of an individual gifted, or rather accursed, with an intellect very far superior to that of his race. Of course he would be conscious of his superiority; nor could he (if otherwise constituted as man is) help manifesting his consciousness. Thus he would make himself enemies at all points. And since his opinions and speculations would widely differ from those of all mankind - that he would be considered a madman is evident. How horribly painful such a condition! Hell could invent no greater torture than that of being charged with abnormal weakness on account of being abnormally strong. In like manner, nothing can be clearer than that a very generous spirit - truly feeling what all merely profess - must inevitably find itself misconceived in every direction - its motives misinterpreted. Just as extremeness of intelligence would be thought fatuity, so excess of chivalry could not fail of being looked upon as meanness in the last degree - and so on with other virtues. This subject is a painful one indeed. That individuals have so soared above the plane of their race is scarcely to be questioned; but, in looking back through history for traces of their existence, we should pass over all the biographies of the 'good and the great,' while we search carefully the slight records of wretches who died in prison, in Bedlam, or upon the gallows.

I've walked these streets in the mad house asylum they can be where a wild eyed misfit prophet on a traffic island stopped and he raved of saving me

people ruthless, people cruel see the damage that some people do full of hatred, full of pride it's enough to make you lose your mind

That's me insane to the root Not insane. Driven by a sense of purpose that is frightening

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

I'm psycho, and so are my bros.

Ira furor brevis est.

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants [sic] from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

Without madness what is man / more than the healthy beast, / corpse adjourned that procreates?

Kein Hirt und Eine Heerde! Jeder will das Gleiche, Jeder ist gleich: wer anders fuhlt, geht freiwillig in's Irrenhaus.

Es ist immer etwas Wahnsinn in der Liebe. Es ist aber immer auch etwas Vernunft im Wahnsinn.

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

Seht sie klettern, diese geschwinden Affen! Sie klettern uber einander hinweg und zerren sich also in den Schlamm und die Tiefe. Hin zum Throne wollen sie Alle: ihr Wahnsinn ist es, - als ob das Gluck auf dem Throne sasse! Oft sitzt der Schlamm auf dem Thron - und oft auch der Thron auf dem Schlamme. Wahnsinnige sind sie mir Alle und kletternde Affen und Uberheisse. Ubel riecht mir ihr Gotze, das kalte Unthier: ubel riechen sie mir alle zusammen, diese Gotzendiener.

Independence is an issue that concerns very few people: - it is a prerogative of the strong. And even when somebody has every right to be independent, if he attempts such a thing without having to do so, he proves that he is probably not only strong, but brave to the point of madness. He enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience. And assuming a man like this is destroyed, it is an event so far from human comprehension that people do not feel it or feel for him: - and he cannot go back again! He cannot go back to their pity again!

The extreme limit of wisdom - that's what the public calls madness.

That Marti is a madman - but a dangerous madman.

'...in the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them . . . .' (p. 3)

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

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.