Madness Quotes

I'll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don't tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it! - Don't turn the light on!

~ Tennessee Williams

It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

May the dead forgive me, I can do no otherBut as I am commanded; to do more is madness. - Ismene

~ Sophocles

May the dead forgive me, I can do no otherBut as I am commanded; to do more is madness. - Ismene, Antigone (The Theban Plays) by Sophocles

~ Sophocles

Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut...

~ Sanhita Baruah

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!

~ William Shakespeare

I said that my mother is mad. I said that. But you might not see it. I mean, you might not think that anything I've told you proves she is mad. But there are different kinds of madness. Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow. Then one day, maybe many months after your decision to take your son out of school and isolate him in a house for reasons that got lost in your grief, one day that madness will stir in the chair, and it will say to him, 'You look pale.

~ Nathan Filer

At least I rescued your poor hot dog.

~ R.l. Stine

If you try to hold people to your standard of conduct you will go mad with disappointment and grief.

~ Bryant Mcgill

The Sad Boy Ay, his old mother was a glad one.And his poor old father was a mad one.The two begot this sad one.Alas for the single shoeThe Sad Boy pulled out of the rank green pond,Fishing for fairiesOn the prankish adviceOf two disagreeable lovers of small boys.Pity the unfortunate Sad BoyWith a single magic shoeAnd a pair of feetAnd an extra footWith no shoe for it.This was how the terrible hopping beganThat wore the Sad Boy thin and throughTo his only shoeAnd started the great fright in the provinces above BrentWhere the Sad Boy became half of himselfTo match the beautiful bootHe had dripped from the green pond.Wherever he went weeping and hoppingAnd stamping and sobbing,Pounding a whole earth into a half-heaven,Things split where he stoodInto the left side for the left magic,Into no side for the missing right boot.Mercy be to the Sad BoyScamping exasperatedAfter a wide bootTo double the magicOf a limping foot.Mercy to the melancholy folkOn the Sad Boy's right.It was not for want of wanderingHe lost the left boot tooAnd the knowledge of his left side,But because one awful SundayThis dear boy dislimbedWent back to the old pondTo fish up another shoeAnd was quickly (being too light for his line)Fished in.Gracious how he kicks nowAll the little ripples up!The quiet population of Brent has settled down,And the perfect surface of the famous pondIs slightly pocked, marked with three signs,For visitors come to fish for souvenirs,Where the Sad Boy went inAnd his glad mother and his mad father after him.

~ Laura Riding Jackson

Everyone has it's own great triumph, has he own story with sadness, madness and reverses. That's how we are build, few are the people which share their story, most cases because of shame.

~ Deyth Banger

I have always been sensitive to vibrations and energies. Sometimes, I meet people and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I know that person is just wrong somehow. That their wiring is different, their moral compass screwed.

~ Tabatha Stirling

I finally gave in today. Admitting that I haven't been able to do it alone, that's defeat right? But do a couple pills change why I'm here? Will my spirit be altered? Do my passions change? Will I lose hope either way? My madness is what makes me. It’s my most unique beauty.

~ Crystal Woods

A little madness shows the way to happiness.A little kindness can heal the sadness.

~ Debasish Mridha

I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness - and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; afraid that the disease which eats away the pith of my body with merciless impersonality will break forth in obvious sores and warts, screaming Traitor, sinner, imposter.

~ Sylvia Plath

We are creatures of rage and madness and bitter tears and we knew that from the start. Our end was disaster and we knew that from the start. We knew it all from the start.

~ Thomas Curtis Clark

It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me

~ Lynda Barry

precious laughing time is wasted, because I have to put up with Satan's stupid minions who smile without attempting to anger somebody else - leave us alone already.

~ A Gentlemen

Wondering is a positive madness.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws - Love is blind. But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity. Certainly from the perspective of ordinary life this is madness and illusion. But if we let loose our hold on our philosophies and psychologies of enlightenment and reason, we might learn to appreciate the perspective of eternity that enters life as madness, Plato's divine frenzy.

~ Thomas Moore

Internet makes you think that you have millions of friends, whereas you are your own friend.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness.

~ Blaise Pascal

Jack's doctors have told him he is crazy… but, the truth is, it's the Voices who are crazy, not him.

~ Jennifer Daydreamer

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I think people give up, because it's the easy option, but my goodness; why would giving up be easy? Your living your life chasing anything to fill the void of what came about when you let go of everything that mattered? I'd rather fight like mad, for everything that will ever matter, because giving in to anything that doesn't will never cure the dream.

~ Nikki Rowe

Why should I laugh?' asked the old man. 'Madness in youth is true wisdom. Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it.

~ Andrew Lang

Dissociation is the common response of children to repetitive, overwhelming trauma and holds the untenable knowledge out of awareness. The losses and the emotions engendered by the assaults on soul and body cannot, however be held indefinitely. In the absence of effective restorative experiences, the reactions to trauma will find expression. As the child gets older, he will turn the rage in upon himself or act it out on others, else it all will turn into madness.

~ Judith Spencer

Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics - in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.

~ Susanna Clarke

Wow, a trifecta: Murder, Madness and Magic, the three things you hate most of anything in the world.

~ Chris Dee

He had discovered that it was easier – far easier than any one could have supposed – to make oneself mad, but like all magic it was full of obstacles and frustrations. Even if he succeeded in summoning the fairy (which did not seem very likely), he would be in nocondition to talk to him. Every book he had ever read on the subject urged magicians to be on their guard when dealing with fairies. Just when he needed all his wits, he would have scarcely any wits at all.

~ Susanna Clarke

A true god surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough... [or inspired] books, filled with contradictions, madness, and horror.

~ Voltaire

But at some point it becomes obvious that, ultimately, the adventure of faith is the most sensible thing to do, and in fact the only thing worth doing. As Sam says toward the end of The Two Towers, no one remembers the tales in which the characters give up and turn back. Great and heroic deeds remain undone if no one leaps into the dark to do them. That's true when it comes to faith, too. You can't play a meaningful role in the great story by playing it safe. Once you hit the road, there is no going back to life as it was before. When Jesus asks His disciples if they will leave him to, Peter says, Lord to whom will we go? (verse 68). It's either walk with Jesus, unsafe as it seems sometimes, or go home.

~ Sarah Arthur

A moment of anger is a moment of resentment and madness which can burn your heart.

~ Debasish Mridha

I don't possess these thoughts I have --- they possess me. I don't possess these feelings I have --- They obsess me.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

I was frightened of myself, I seemed to have no control over my thoughts and feelings, it was like a sort of madness...

~ Susan Hill

There is madness in the every heart.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it.

~ Ted Morgan

He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility.

~ Stephen King

But a lonely man is an unnatural man, and soon comes to perplexity. From perplexity to fantasy. From fantasy to madness.

~ Daphne Du Maurier

Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was insanity, wrapped up in the thin, transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity; and she was afraid, because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her.

~ Nenia Campbell