quotations about madness
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
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
We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind
To suffer with the body.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
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
Sanity brings pain
but madness is a vile thing.
EURIPIDES
Hippolytus
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
Madness is like gravity--all you need is a little push.
JONATHAN & CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
The Dark Knight
Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.
BRAM STOKER
Dracula
I am not mad; I would to heaven I were!
For then, 'tis like I should forget myself.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King John
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
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
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
First sign of madness, talking to your own head.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
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 in great ones must not unwatched go.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness.... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
EMIL CIORAN
On the Heights of Despair