quotations about madness
Oh! thou who art greatly mad, deign to spare me who am less mad.
HORACE
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Satires
Without madness what is man
But a wholesome beast,
Postponed corpse that begets?
FERNANDO PESSOA
"D. Sebastião"
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Temple"
Why is it that madness holds such a fascination to human societies the world over? What is it about the "imbalance" of those afflicted that spurs us on to write about, paint, dramatize and immortalize in our legends caricatures of suffering people?
JONATHAN BURNS
The Descent of Madness: Evolutionary Origins of Psychosis and the Social Brain
There are so many kinds of madness, so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is so. Yes. A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us--but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and we go insane.
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
"The Case of Beauvais", Back to God's Country and Other Stories
Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified.
SUSANNA KAYSEN
Girl, Interrupted
Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.
MARYA HORNBACHER
Madness: A Bipolar Life
Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life.
C. G. JUNG
The Red Book
Trying to speak and write about madness induces its felt impact: words slip, slide, and break, fall into nowhere. Disorder defeats any clear line of exposition. Like a spell or a fog or pollen in the air, to speak of madness is to be infiltrated by experiences of its derangement that we both know and deny.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness.... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
EMIL CIORAN
On the Heights of Despair
I don't know what it is with the mad, but they've certainly got force of will. Maybe it's not having the checks and balances the rest of us have, or perhaps I'm kidding myself: maybe their minds are simply clearer, unclouded with the anxieties and morality that the rest of us are swaddled with. Perhaps they have the courage to point their magical thinking at the stars.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO & CHUCK HOGAN
The Fall
Anger is a brief madness.
HORACE
Epistles
Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.
R. D. LAING
"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964
Fetter strong madness in a silken thread.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Much Ado About Nothing
In ancient Greek culture, the image of madness is that of a black, angry, inner flood. The organic source of madness is black liquid. It seethes up from below, manifesting itself in uncontrolled passion, illness, and violence. It rebels against order and tradition. It wanders from its natural course. And in some instances ... the madness passes, and the mad are left to contemplate the destruction they have wrought.
GARY ROSENSHIELD
Pushkin and the Genres of Madness: The Masterpieces of 1833
One knows one's madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.
GLEN DUNCAN
The Last Werewolf
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
I am not mad; I would to heaven I were!
For then, 'tis like I should forget myself.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King John