MADNESS QUOTES
quotations about madness
All I have to do is set the power free. Escape the chains of humanity, let madness be my guide. If I forget everything but Wonderland, I can become beautiful pandemonium.
A. G. HOWARD
Unhinged
Sometimes even the devil on my shoulder asks "What the f*** are you doing?"
ANONYMOUS
Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that--as if that weren't enough--but you ... ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherancy, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.
PHILIP K. DICK
Valis
O, hark! what mean those yells and cries?
His chain some furious madman breaks;
He comes--I see his glaring eyes;
Now, now, my dungeon grate he shakes.
Help! Help! He's gone!--O fearful woe,
Such screams to hear, such sights to see!
My brain, my brain,--I know, I know
I am not mad but soon shall be.
MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS
The Maniac
Madness is ... a form of vision that destroys itself by its own choice of oblivion in the face of existing forms of social tactics and strategy.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
What we see of madness is mostly a set of defense mechanisms against it, against the void and the anxiety that are madness. We see the obsessive ceremonies, the phobias, the hysterical symptoms, but all that is already part of a solution of the problem, unsatisfactory as it may be.
ERMANNO BENCIVENGA
Freedom: A Dialogue
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"
The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
The Waste Books
I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Ham on Rye
Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss -- and grow.
NATHAN FILER
The Shock and the Fall
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
There is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.
DOUGLAS ADAMS
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Though this be madness, yet there is a method in't.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Madness tracked him like a homeless dog, needed only a kind word or gesture to throw its lot with him forever.
WILLIAM GAY
Provinces of Night
Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
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
Great wits are sure to madness near allied;
And thin partitions do their bonds divide.
JOHN DRYDEN
Absalom and Achitophel
Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.
ROHINTON MISTRY
A Fine Balance
Madness borrowed its face from the mask of the beast.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization