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.

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.