quotations about madness
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
Madness is like gravity--all you need is a little push.
JONATHAN & CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
The Dark Knight
We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind
To suffer with the body.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
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
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
Is it so far from madness to wisdom?
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A Game of Thrones
To expect an impossibility is madness.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified.
SUSANNA KAYSEN
Girl, Interrupted
Sanity brings pain
but madness is a vile thing.
EURIPIDES
Hippolytus
Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"On the Classics", Selected Essays
The idea that madness is an illness affecting the mind is merely a recognition of the objective reality that it has always had. Earlier ideas that the mad were filled with a god, diabolically possessed, had chosen to embrace unreason, and so forth, were merely mistakes that have been replaced by our scientific discovery that madness is actually mental illness.
GARY GUTTING
Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason
Trying to speak and write about madness induces its felt impact: words slip, slide, and break, fall into nowhere. Disorder defeats any clear line of exposition. Like a spell or a fog or pollen in the air, to speak of madness is to be infiltrated by experiences of its derangement that we both know and deny.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity
Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
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
It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.
THOMAS MOORE
Care of the Soul
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
The language of madness is thus marked by privacy, immediacy, and soliloquy -- what appears on the outside as either silence or delirium.
DANIEL BERTHOLD-BOND
Hegel's Theory of Madness
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
I am not mad; I would to heaven I were!
For then, 'tis like I should forget myself.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King John
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet