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To think that the spectre you see is an illusion does not rob him of his terrors: it simply adds the further terror of madness itself -- and then on top of that the horrible surmise that those whom the rest call mad have, all along, been the only people who see the world as it really is.
- Great wits are sure to madness near allied;
- And thin partitions do their bonds divide.
JOHN DRYDEN, Absalom and Achitophel
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
- Like madness is the glory of this life
- As this pomp shows to a little oil and root.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Life of Timon of Athens
Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
G.K. CHESTERTON, "On the Classics," Selected Essays
Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be!
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, Don Quixote
Anger is a brief madness.
Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
E.M. CIORAN, History and Utopia
- Sanity brings pain
- but madness is a vile thing.
Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence— whether much that is glorious— whether all that is profound— does not spring from disease of thought— from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
EDGAR ALLAN POE, "Eleonora"
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
- And men, whose reason long was blind,
- From cells of madness unconfined,
- Oft lose whole years of darker mind.
ALFRED TENNYSON, The Two Voices
I have seen mad people, and I have known some who were quite intelligent, lucid, even clear-sighted in every concern of life, except on one point. They could speak clearly, readily, profoundly on everything; till their thoughts were caught in the breakers of their delusions and went to pieces there, were dispersed and swamped in that furious and terrible sea of fogs and squalls which is called MADNESS.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT, "The Horla"
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT, "The Tomb"
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
GEORGE SANTAYANA, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
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