quotations about madness
In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness.
SAUL BELLOW
Henderson the Rain King
Dream not ... of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, June 10, 1796
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.
C. S. LEWIS
Perelandra
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
He appears mad indeed but to a few, because the majority is infected with the same disease.
HORACE
Satires
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 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"
Madness is something rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind
To suffer with the body.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
To expect an impossibility is madness.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Oh! thou who art greatly mad, deign to spare me who am less mad.
HORACE
Satires
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
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
The brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
YANN MARTEL
Life of Pi
Madness is like gravity--all you need is a little push.
JONATHAN & CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
The Dark Knight
Madness is simpler than it looks: it is our effort to express unbearable pain.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity
Madness hath imaginary bliss, and most men have no more.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Sanity brings pain
but madness is a vile thing.
EURIPIDES
Hippolytus
Whom the gods destroy they first make mad.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
Kull: Exile of Atlantis