Madness Quotes

Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

~ G.k. Chesterton

I am aware that humans believe they are the sole owners of this curse, but all creatures love, Dieter. Love is our one shared madness, our one shared burden. All creatures are driven against sense by it, and even the lowest ant will die madly for her queen.

~ B. Justin Shier

One is always considered mad when one perfects something that others cannot grasp.

~ Ed Wood

Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked.

~ Michael Gruber

To begin cooking duck at one in the morning is one of the finest acts of madness that can be undertaken by a human being who is not mad.

~ Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Sir,' I interrupted him, 'you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady; you speak of her with hate --- with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel --- she cannot help being mad.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.

~ Paolo Bacigalupi

This is what I am talking about: the bewitching power of moonlight. Moonlight incites dark passions like a cold flame, making hearts burning with the intensity of phosphorus.

~ Rampo Edogawa

Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find the means frightening.

~ Floriano Martins

Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn't allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he'd have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what he'd really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again.

~ David Foster Wallace

The most work he did on [the urinals] was to run a brush once or twice apiece, singing some song as loud as he could in time to the swishing brush; then he'd splash in some Clorox and he'd be through. ... And when the Big Nurse...came in to check McMurphy's cleaning assignment personally, she brought a little compact mirror and she held it under the rim of the bowls. She walked along shaking her head and saying, Why, this is an outrage... an outrage... at every bowl. McMurphy sidled right along beside her, winking down his nose and saying in answer, No; that's a toilet bowl...a TOILET bowl.

~ Ken Kesey

In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

~ Charles Mackay

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,Shakes so my single state of manThat function is smothered in surmise,And nothing is but what is not.

~ William Shakespeare

Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.

~ G.k. Chesterton

There are those to whom one must advise madness.

~ Joseph Joubert

Se o problema são os demónios estrangula-os com a tua loucura.If the problem is the demons strangle them with your madness.

~ Victor Eustáquio

I was in the situation of someone who has assumed, all his life, that madness was on eway, and suddenly in its grip, discovers that it is not only different from the way he'd imagined but that the person suffering from it is someone else, and that this someone else is not interested in finding out what madness is like: he is simply immersed in it, or it has descended on him, and that's that.

~ Felisberto Hernández

Can one man's madness be another's real life?

~ Emma Frances Dawson

I walked into my own book, seeking peace.It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.

~ Anaïs Nin

Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by impelling us to seek remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and the ignorance of the future..

~ Charles Mackay

«…you’re too old not to have had, how shall I say, certain experiences. You’ve had bad internet dates. You’ve had people be creeps to you. You’ve seen what you’ve seen; you’ve felt what you’ve felt. Ideology is for people who don’t trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world»«I feel like I am going mad»«Madness is actually quite rare in individuals. It’s groups of people who go mad. Countries, cults ... religions»

~ Douglas Coupland

I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banaility.

~ Elizabeth Bowen

Sometimes I wonder if the human race isn't collectively as mad as a sack of door knobs.

~ Jasper Fforde

I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit. The bearings are overheating: a minute longer and the metal will melt and start dripping and that will be the end of everything. I need a splash of cold water, logic; I pour it on in buckets but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd always hoped that someday I'd be able to use it.

~ Donna Tartt

The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language.

~ Michel Foucault

In the midst of our worried searching we recklessly abandon the treasures that life has bestowed upon us in the mad hunt for that which we wish to bestow upon ourselves.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Marcus turned his back to her. He feared that if he saw her face, it might weaken his resolve. Love was indeed a madness.

~ Jennifer Mckeithen

We can go mad whenever we like. We can leave our minds behind and play in the garden at night. The gate is always open. And the moon is always bright.

~ Jj Vladimir

Revirgination surgery for women is the fastest growing segment within the Indian cosmetic surgery industry. But any culture that decides a woman’s worth by the presence or absence of a membrane needs to examine its collective head.

~ Mallika Nawal

All they see is madness. It’s the same with the other men. They see my situation, not me.

~ Eliza Granville

You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.

~ Nikos Kazantzakis

There is a madness in me that does not follow society.

~ Avijeet Das

Love is a mental madness.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Maybe I was crazy about you. Maybe I was just crazy.

~ Samin

Act – make an event. Smash the coordinates and see where the smithereens fly. Let in the madness, and be sure to be a danger to oneself and others. Too much thinking turns you into that fool Hamlet.

~ Hanif Kureishi

The last madness I’ll probably persist in is to believe myself a poet: it will be up to the critics to cure me.

~ Gérard De Nerval

Hail fellow well meet on the highway to madness. Madness is a small town very far away. Most of us, at some point, find we probably could walk there. Others have a road cave in and dump them there.

~ Helen Slavin

There was a madness in my story, but it was a madness I understood.

~ Stephen King