quotations about madness
What is Madness? To me the question is like the parable of the blind men describing the elephant -- each blind man thought of the elephant as something else depending upon what part he was touching -- the man who touched the tail thought the elephant a rope, the man who felt the ear thought a large fan. I see "madness" as a complex state of being when things, feelings or events seem to make no logical sense or order to all those who have decided what logical sense or order is.
SHERRY HIRSCH
Madness Network News: A Journal of the Psychiatric Survivor Movement
In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.
THOMAS SZASZ
introduction, The Manufacture of Madness
Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead.
MATT HAIG
The Humans
I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
EMIL CIORAN
On the Heights of Despair
The road to madness is madness.
LEWIS BLACK
Twitter, March 9, 2020
Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
E. M. CIORAN
History and Utopia
They call me mad, while they are all mad themselves.
PLAUTUS
MENAECHMI
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
Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
'Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur -- you're straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.
EMILY DICKINSON
"Much Madness is divinest Sense"
So long as man is protected by madness, he functions and flourishes.
EMIL CIORAN
A Short History of Decay
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 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
Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese fingertrap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, [one] ... slipped by degrees into madness.
PHILIP K. DICK
Valis
You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.
MEGAN CHANCE
The Spiritualist
In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness.
SAUL BELLOW
Henderson the Rain King
The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.
PHILIP K. DICK
Valis
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
You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.
LEWIS CARROLL
Alice in Wonderland
In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
AKIRA KUROSAWA
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing
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