Madness Quotes

Soon madness has worn you down. It’s easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you’re worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.

~ Marya Hornbacher

Some are born mad, some achieve madness, and some have madness thrust upon 'em.

~ Emilie Autumn

Sometimes, to regain sanity, one had to acknowledge and embrace the madness.

~ Morgan Rhodes

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

~ R.d. Laing

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.

~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

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

~ Josh Malerman

Madness breeds madness.

~ Dan Brown

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.

~ Nathan Filer

Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.

~ Douglas Adams

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.

~ Yann Martel

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.

~ Charles Baudelaire

There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.

~ Anaïs Nin

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it... he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.

~ Donald Barthelme

Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?

~ Fernando Pessoa

Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness

~ Erich Segal

Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?

~ Jon Ronson

Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.

~ Douglas Adams

Great wits are to madness near alliedAnd thin partitions do their bounds divide.

~ John Dryden

A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves

~ Agatha Christie

Let me be mad, then, by all means! mad with the madness of Absinthe, the wildest, most luxurious madness in the world! Vive la folie! Vive l'amour! Vive l'animalisme! Vive le Diable!

~ Marie Corelli

O God, I love you to the edge of madness, Venetia, but I'm not mad yet--not so mad that I don't know how disastrous it might be to you--to us both! You don't realize what an advantage I should be taking of your innocence!

~ Georgette Heyer

Magnus hoped if he ever went mad like that himself, so mad that he poisoned the very air round him and hurt everyone he came into contact with, that there would be someone ho loved him enough to stop him. To kill him, if it came to that.

~ Cassandra Clare

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.

~ Herman Melville

The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.

~ Robert Anton Wilson

If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us.--The Content of the Psychoses

~ C.g. Jung

Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.

~ Karen Joy Fowler

I have lived nearly fifty years, and I have seen life as it is. Pain, misery, hunger ... cruelty beyond belief. I have heard the singing from taverns and the moans from bundles of filth on the streets. I have been a soldier and seen my comrades fall in battle ... or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I have held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no gallant last words ... only their eyes filled with confusion, whimpering the question, Why?I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!

~ Dale Wasserman

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.

~ Tom Stoppard

The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness.

~ Mick Jagger

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

~ Rudyard Kipling

He knew that Hop-Frog was not fond of wine, for it excited the poor cripple almost to madness, and madness is no comfortable feeling.

~ Edgar Allan Poe

One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness

~ Anne Lamott

Love is a temporary madness; it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.” ~Louis de Bernieres

~ Louis De Bernières

In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?

~ Thomas Pynchon

Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again.

~ Jerry Pinto

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.

~ Charles Mackay

There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we're lucky we're Odysseus tied up to the ship's mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we're not at all lucky, we're another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea.

~ Caitlín R. Kiernan

Once upon a time there was aOnce upon a time there was aOnce upon a time there was aStop this. It's undignified.

~ N.k. Jemisin

Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing.

~ Penelope Fitzgerald

Bashere shrugged, grinning brhind his grey-streaked moustaches, When I first slept in a saddle, Muad Cheade was Marshal-General. The man was as mad as a hare in spring thaw. Twice every day he searched his bodyservant for poison, and he drank nothing but vinegar and water which he claimed was sovereign against the poison the fellow fed him, but he ate everything the man prepared for as long as I knew him. Once he had a grove of oaks chopped down because they were looking at him. And then insisted they be given decent funerals; he gave the oration. Do you have any idea how long it takes to dig graves for twenty-three oak trees? Why didn't somebody do something? His Family? Those not as mad as him, or madder, were afraid to look at him sideways. Tenobia's father wouldn't have let anyone touch Cheade anyway. He might have been insane, but he could outgeneral anyone I ever saw. He never lost a battle. He never even came close to losing.

~ Robert Jordan