quotations about madness
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
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
First sign of madness, talking to your own head.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
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
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
Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
G. K. CHESTERTON
"On the Classics", Selected Essays
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
In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
DON DELILLO
The Names
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
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
Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO & CHUCK HOGAN
The Fall
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
SYLVIA PLATH
"Elm", Ariel
Fetter strong madness in a silken thread.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Much Ado About Nothing
It's better to face madness with a plan than to sit still and let it take you in pieces.
JOSH MALERMAN
Bird Box
It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.
THOMAS MOORE
Care of the Soul
Somewhere in the depths of solitude, beyond wilderness and freedom, lay the trap of madness.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Monkey Wrench Gang
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
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
So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.
ALAN MOORE
Batman: The Killing Joke
And men, whose reason long was blind,
From cells of madness unconfined,
Oft lose whole years of darker mind.
ALFRED TENNYSON
The Two Voices