quotations about madness
Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.
BALTASAR GRACIAN
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
The schizophrenic may indeed be mad. He is mad. He is not ill. I have been told by people who have been through the mad experience how what was then revealed to them was veritable manna from Heaven. The person's whole life may be changed, but it is difficult not to doubt the validity of such vision. Also, not everyone comes back to us again.
R. D. LAING
"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964
It's not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
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"
In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
AKIRA KUROSAWA
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing
You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.
LEWIS CARROLL
Alice in Wonderland
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R. D. LAING
"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964
Whom the gods destroy they first make mad.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
Kull: Exile of Atlantis
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
Madness hath imaginary bliss, and most men have no more.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
The madman is ... confused. He muddles ego with self, inner with outer, natural and supernatural. Nevertheless, he often can be to us, even through his profound wretchedness and disintegration, the hierophant of the sacred. An exile from the scene of being as we know it, he is an alien, a stranger, signalling to us from the void in which he is foundering. This void may be peopled by presences that we do not even dream of. They used to be called demons and spirits, that were known and named. He has lost his sense of self, his feelings, his place in the world as we know it. He tells us he is dead. But we are distracted from our cozy security by this mad ghost that haunts us with his visions and voices that seem so senseless and of which we feel impelled to rid him, cleanse him, cure him.
R. D. LAING
"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964
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
Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified.
SUSANNA KAYSEN
Girl, Interrupted
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"
There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
Madness is simpler than it looks: it is our effort to express unbearable pain.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity
Without madness what is man
But a wholesome beast,
Postponed corpse that begets?
FERNANDO PESSOA
"D. Sebastião"
You have made the terrible mistake of seeing things as they should be and not as they are--that makes you a very sane madman.
TERRY WALSTROM
The Monorails of Mars
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.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Letters
Mental illness is still seen as a scourge of the Lord. Freud and his offspring turned it into a much more sophisticated scourge. But even for him it is essentially a state of distress resulting from how you have lived your life and how your parents lived theirs. And that is biblical leprosy, not the common cold.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren