quotations about madness
To expect an impossibility is madness.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Madness is like gravity--all you need is a little push.
JONATHAN & CHRISTOPHER NOLAN
The Dark Knight
Mental illness is still seen as a scourge of the Lord. Freud and his offspring turned it into a much more sophisticated scourge. But even for him it is essentially a state of distress resulting from how you have lived your life and how your parents lived theirs. And that is biblical leprosy, not the common cold.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
I am not mad; I would to heaven I were!
For then, 'tis like I should forget myself.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King John
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
Madness is something rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Beyond Good and Evil
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
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
Is it so far from madness to wisdom?
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
A Game of Thrones
We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppress'd, commands the mind
To suffer with the body.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear
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
Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"On the Classics", Selected Essays
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
Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
Fetter strong madness in a silken thread.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Much Ado About Nothing
You are trying to understand madness with logic. This is not unlike searching for darkness with a torch.
BRIAN K. VAUGHN
Detective Comics #787
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
It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.
THOMAS MOORE
Care of the Soul
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Sanity brings pain
but madness is a vile thing.
EURIPIDES
Hippolytus