MADNESS QUOTES V

quotations about madness

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

EDWARD ABBEY

The Monkey Wrench Gang

Tags: Edward Abbey


When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

Don Quixote

Tags: Miguel de Cervantes


First sign of madness, talking to your own head.

J. K. ROWLING

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Tags: J. K. Rowling


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


It's better to face madness with a plan than to sit still and let it take you in pieces.

JOSH MALERMAN

Bird Box


Madness is not real; what is real is audiences' response to and labeling of certain actors and behaviors as "mad."

CAROL A. B. WARREN

Court of Last Resort: Mental Illness and the Law


I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.

BRAM STOKER

Dracula

Tags: Bram Stoker


Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Hamlet

Tags: Shakespeare quotes


I am not mad; I would to heaven I were!
For then, 'tis like I should forget myself.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

King John

Tags: Shakespeare quotes


Madness is not ours alone, but part of the human condition; we cannot segregate it over there apart from our own lives.

ANN BELFORD ULANOV

Madness and Creativity


And men, whose reason long was blind,
From cells of madness unconfined,
Oft lose whole years of darker mind.

ALFRED TENNYSON

The Two Voices

Tags: Alfred Tennyson


There are so many kinds of madness, so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is so. Yes. A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us--but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and we go insane.

JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

"The Case of Beauvais", Back to God's Country and Other Stories

Tags: James Oliver Curwood


Anger is a brief madness.

HORACE

Epistles

Tags: Horace


The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

preface, Madness and Civilization

Tags: Michel Foucault


Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness.

GUILLERMO DEL TORO & CHUCK HOGAN

The Fall

Tags: Guillermo Del Toro


And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.

ANTONIN ARTAUD

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society

Tags: Antonin Artaud


You are trying to understand madness with logic. This is not unlike searching for darkness with a torch.

BRIAN K. VAUGHN

Detective Comics #787


When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth.

MICHEL FOUCAULT

Madness & Civilization

Tags: Michel Foucault


Madness is traumatic; it tears us from our familiar self, leaving a gap so big that it threatens us with no return once we fall into it. Trauma brings its own vocabulary, which we learn bit by bit in the aftermath of the shocking event that instigates it.

ANN BELFORD ULANOV

Madness and Creativity


In ancient Greek culture, the image of madness is that of a black, angry, inner flood. The organic source of madness is black liquid. It seethes up from below, manifesting itself in uncontrolled passion, illness, and violence. It rebels against order and tradition. It wanders from its natural course. And in some instances ... the madness passes, and the mad are left to contemplate the destruction they have wrought.

GARY ROSENSHIELD

Pushkin and the Genres of Madness: The Masterpieces of 1833