MADNESS QUOTES IV

quotations about madness

In our society madness has come to mean mental illness. Mental illness is a dehumanizing label used to justify the social control through psychiatric intervention of troublesome or troubled individuals, who have not violated any laws and therefore cannot be criminally prosecuted and imprisoned, but whose ideas and actions, values and life styles, threaten established power relationships or society in general.

LEONARD FRANK

Madness Network News: A Journal of the Psychiatric Survivor Movement


To expect an impossibility is madness.

MARCUS AURELIUS

Meditations

Tags: Marcus Aurelius


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

Tags: Virginia Woolf


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

Tags: Michael Marshall


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

Tags: Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Madness is something rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Beyond Good and Evil

Tags: Friedrich Nietzsche


Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.

G. K. CHESTERTON

"On the Classics", Selected Essays

Tags: G. K. Chesterton


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

Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald


Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.

EDWARD ABBEY

The Monkey Wrench Gang

Tags: Edward Abbey


Madness is when the highs are too high and the lows are too low.

CAROL SAFER

"The Madwoman on the Streets", Madness Network News: A Journal of the Psychiatric Survivor Movement


Madness is like gravity--all you need is a little push.

JONATHAN & CHRISTOPHER NOLAN

The Dark Knight


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


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

Tags: Glen Duncan


Is it so far from madness to wisdom?

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

A Game of Thrones

Tags: George R. R. Martin


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

Tags: R. D. Laing


Fetter strong madness in a silken thread.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Much Ado About Nothing

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We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind
To suffer with the body.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King Lear

Tags: William Shakespeare


In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.

DON DELILLO

The Names

Tags: Don DeLillo


It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.

THOMAS MOORE

Care of the Soul

Tags: Thomas Moore


Sanity brings pain
but madness is a vile thing.

EURIPIDES

Hippolytus

Tags: Euripides