Madness Quotes

I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

~ Kahlil Gibran

Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I'll walk myself home.

~ Nikki Rowe

Madness has no sense of humour

~ Adam Foulds

GUIL: It [Hamlet's madness] really boils down to symptoms. Pregnant replies, mystic allusions, mistaken identities, arguing his father is his mother, that sort of thing; intimations of suicide, forgoing of exercise, loss of mirth, hints of claustrophobia not to say delusions of imprisonment; invocations of camels, chameleons, capons, whales, weasels, hawks, handsaws -- riddles, quibbles and evasions; amnesia, paranoia, myopia; day-dreaming, hallucinations; stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public -- knock-kneed, droop-stockinged and sighing like a love-sick schoolboy, which at his age is coming on a bit strong.ROS: And talking to himself.GUIL: And talking to himself.

~ Tom Stoppard

If we had to earn our age by thinking for ourselves at least once a year, only a handful of people would reach adulthood.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation

~ Julia Kristeva

I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again.

~ Nicole Lyons

And yet she was content to pair off with this dull young adventurer in the tarnished lace! It was, he supposed, the sort of thing to be expected of a sex that all philosophy had taught him to regard as the maddest part of a mad species.

~ Rafael Sabatini

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

~ Rob Siltanen

The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

~ Rob Siltanen

I never think of policemen's wives, their beauty maddens me like wine.

~ Kyril Bonfiglioli

Why,' I said, quite surprised by my own eloquence in inventing all this stuff, 'it happens every day. The old old story. Boys and girls fall in love, that is, they are driven mad and go blind and deaf and see each other not as human animals with comic noses and bandy legs and voices like frogs, but as angels so full of shining goodness that like hollow turnips with candles put into them, they seem miracles of beauty. And the next minute the candles shoot out sparks and burn their eyes. And they seem to each other like devils, full of spite and cruelty. And they will drive each other mad unless they have grown some imagination. Even enough to laugh.

~ Joyce Cary

She burns like the sunBeautiful when she comes undoneNo restraintsPure passion flowing through her veinsMadness refusing to be tamed.

~ Melody Lee

My soulmust reachinto the cloudsand touch the beauty of madness.

~ Melody Lee

Find beauty in the madness.

~ A.d. Posey

It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed

~ Thomas Moore

My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.

~ Fernando Pessoa

All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.

~ Roman Payne

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

~ William Saroyan

Crazy people are considered mad by the rest of the society only because their intelligence isn't understood.

~ Zhou Weihui

Madness is the acme of intelligence.

~ نجيب محفوظ

Men have called me mad; but the question is not settled whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence -- whether much that is glorious -- whether all that is profound -- does not spring from disease of thought -- from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who only dream by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the ‘light ineffable’.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?

~ Edgar Allan Poe

The best people are always the worst. They drive everyone mad by being so good at second-guessing everything bad.

~ Criss Jami

When your madness is creative and necessary, people will not notice the fact that you are crazy.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

~ William Golding

The human race will last. Everywhere and forever, for it will never be sane and only insanity is divine. Only the mad destroy themselves and all they have wrought.And only the phoenix lives forever.

~ Fredric Brown

Fantasy, an unflagging optimism is necessary for a writer at all stages of this rough game. A kind of madness is therefore necessary, when there is every logical reason for a state of depression and discouragement. Perhaps the fact that I can react with utter gloom to this is what keeps me from being psychotic and keeps me merely neurotic. I am doing quite a good day's work today. But I am also aware of the madness that actually sustains me, and I am not made more comfortable or happy by it.

~ Patricia Highsmith

There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.

~ Gabriel Chevallier

WHO AM I?I have seven heavenly panelsLeading up to a pointed sphereI’m multidimensional like a crystalAnd my center is never clear.I’m an inventor and pioneer.A mentor to my peers.But I'm not as sound as my shell reveals,Because I’m tormented by my fears -That may appear to be groundedBut my insides are filled with tears.And the sadness is well-founded,From years and yearsOf traumatic experiencesCompoundedIn the most dementedAtmospheres.I talk but feel like nobody hears.Has reason disappeared?And, God, are you near?This is Giza’s 7th light forceAnd I'm asking you to interfere.I can no longer walk amongst the blind and deadWith open eyes and ears.I’m trying to maintain my sanityAnd to straighten up my veneerAs I roll amongst the growing calamitiesFlowing on Earth’s severely trashedFrontier.Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)

~ Suzy Kassem

Almost every day I can feel myself suffering mainly in the head, I can explain the pain to myself but knowing it comes from an inflammation of my imagination doesn't prevent it being reality itself. What's more I'd be crazy not to go crazy. We don't know what an illness is. On awful hurts we plaster little old words, as if we could think hell with a paper bandage.

~ Hélène Cixous

He started hammering the ground with all his might and the sky opened up, raining heavily on him. He looked at the sky, heard that thunder and saw that lightning. He laughed maniacally before raising the hammer again.

~ Akshay Vasu

No matter how much I tried to justify the affair, the fact remained that I was a deceitful person. One moment I was making out with a man and an hour later I was in bed with another man. Who had I become? What had I lost in life that led me to do this? Did I not have a perfect life? Was I not happy? Of course, I was happy. I knew I was happy and content. Had I become greedy? I was in a maze and I could not find a way out.

~ Jagdish Joghee

I guess in this culture of ever-shortening attention spans, it's good if a song can lift us out of the madness, even if only for a few minutes.

~ Peter Bradley Adams

There are many ties that bind, and as many walls that divide. Music and madness. Love and unending time. Race and war. Strum weaves together each element into a larger human tapestry of light and shadow, where a combination of fate and decision can define a family's legacy.

~ Nancy Young

There is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact it's all dark.

~ Pink Floyd

Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.

~ Ian Mcewan

There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

~ Patrick Rothfuss