Madness At Quotes

#1. A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

#2.
Let us make a pact, she said. To madness at every juncture!

Jesse Ball

#3. [W]hat seems like madness at its inception will become the way things have always been if you give it enough time.

Mira Grant

#4. Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.

Will Self

#5. What madness it is for a man to starve himself to enrich his heir, and so turn a friend into an enemy! For his joy at your death will be proportioned to what you leave him.

Seneca The Younger

#6. Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.

Virginia Woolf

#7. He left the room, unable to watch her standing there, naked with her underwear on her head, laughing at her own absurd madness.

Lisa Genova

#8. Don't give into him at all. Deny yourself. Because then your eyes will not be clouded by a madness that you cannot control, and then you will be able to learn to see him as he is. Do you understand?

Louis De Bernieres

#9. Sanity is found at the centre of convulsion, where madness is scorched
from the bisected soul.

Sarah Kane

#10. Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.

Jon Ronson

#11. This was how life was meant to be. It was scary at times, but you had to trust in the ones you loved to see you through the madness of it.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#12. Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice- we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs.

Yann Martel

#13. He had the "Love-sonnets from the Portuguese" in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best conditions for great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of his own sweet love-madness. The

Jack London

#14. Then come at once and pause for breath
In chasing wealth. Remembering death
And death's dark fires, mix, while you may,
Method and madness, work and play.
Folly is sweet, well-timed.

Horace

#15. 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

#16. But today I would suggest you ponder these verses from Ecclesiastes: "And he would have seven flights of madness in his soul, who, having hung his clothes beneath the sun, would groan at the hour of rain,

Arthur Rimbaud

#17. If you look at the monkeys, you can learn many things about the men; if you look at the men, you can learn many things about the madness!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#18. What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.

Theodore Roethke

#19. Was it a form of madness, no longer to be able to trust your sense of things? To be betrayed by decisions apparently arrived at carefully and through reason, but really no more than marauding appetites cunningly tricked out as reasonable choices?

Paul Russell

#20. So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.

Ray Bradbury

#21. He was happy because, after such a long study, experimentation, and struggle, he could at last affirm the ultimate truth: there never were and never would be any madmen in Itaguai or anywhere else.

Machado De Assis

#22. The woman looked out at the madness of the world and dared to hope. Her eyes were burning coals of stars.

Rivera Sun

#23. In order to be truly great at something you have to give into a certain amount of madness.

Joe Rogan

#24. She could not bear to look at him just now. If she did, she might well slap him again. Or cry. Or kiss him. And never know which was right and which was wrong and which was madness.

George R R Martin

#25. Creativity is not being afraid to be different. It takes madness to jump at an idea that no one else believes in.

Barbara Januszkiewicz

#26. Going insane would be worse than dying. At least death is clear and final

Rita Stradling

#27. Ultimately, what audiences respond to is truth. Even as fantastical as the story can be, and out there, at its core, it's dealing with loss, madness and mortality.

Francesca Gregorini

#28. Backstage at the Victoria's Secret show is pure madness. Big personalities, big hair, and tons of press.

Erin Heatherton

#29. Don't feel better than anybody, because you feel like something. Always have it at the back of your mind that you were nothing before you became something, and that thing you supposed to be is absolutely nothing.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#30. I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.

Anne Rice

#31. Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky.

Lauren DeStefano

#32. They burn books now, mama.The monsters burn fucking books now, mama. They have eyes full of disappointing madness. Their tongues taste like fulvous indoctrination. They teach us. Teach us sadism, hatred, lust to kill, conformity. What do you see when you look at me? Daddy?

Laura Gentile

#33. Here am bound, the scorn of fate; 'Twas a dream that once a state I enjoyed of light and gladness. What is life? 'Tis but a madness. What is life? A thing that seems, A mirage that falsely gleams, Phantom joy, delusive rest, Since is life a dream at best, And even dreams themselves are dreams.

Pedro Calderon De La Barca

#34. The convict is greedy for money, to the point of madness, and if he throws it away he does so in order to procure what he values far above money - liberty, or at least semblance of liberty.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#35. I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.

William, Saroyan

#36. One lunatic in Rampton used to have bouts of hysteria. Where he would let out a scream, and run at a wall and dive headfirst ... crash! He was given a crash helmet! (Well it is a mad house.)

Stephen Richards

#37. The situation collapsed completely at dinner one September evening. Perhaps it was the full moon that drove me to madness, or the gnawing, relentless emptiness of my heart. Whatever the trigger, the powder had been well packed, and my explosion, though shocking, was not altogether unexpected.

Catherine Gilbert Murdock

#38. We have for too long been taught that the sight of a man speaking to himself is a sign of eccentricity or madness; we are no longer at all habituated to our own voices, except in conversation or from within the safety of a shouting crowd.

Teju Cole

#39. The man who arrives at the doors of artistic creation with none of the madness of the Muses would be convinced that technical ability alone was enough to make an artist ... what that man creates by means of reason will pale before the art of inspired beings.

Plato

#40. When you think of the 'Exorcist,' you think of Linda Blair and pea soup and all this madness, but really if you look at the first half of that film, the stuff between her and Ellen Burstyn is so naturalistic and so real.

Matt Reeves

#41. Hunger, prolonged, is temporary madness! The brain is at work without its required food, and the most fantastic notions fill the mind. Hitherto I had never known what hunger really meant. I was likely to understand it now.

Jules Verne

#42. Sin is hell, grace is heaven; what madness it is to look more at hell than heaven.

Thomas Brooks

#43. You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.

Marya Hornbacher

#44. 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

#45. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#46. It seemed humans, the scientifically minded ones at least, were either tempting death or trying to prolong life. Surely that was an indication of madness.

Kady Cross

#47. One captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duelist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab.

Herman Melville

#48. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.

Hunter S. Thompson

#49. Sometimes I feel sure he is as mad as a hatter and then, just as he is at his maddest, I find there is a method in his madness.

Agatha Christie

#50. All I hope for is one moment of rational thought and a shot at action before I'm lost to a great saddening madness, pithed at the hands of my own stumbling biology.

[Johnny Truant]

Mark Z. Danielewski

#51. I just really thought about it and decided I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all. And I think it's really madness to risk your body, risk your well-being and risk your happiness for money.

John Moffitt

#52. Certainly, Gandhi is not inferior to Christ in goodness and sanctity, and he surpasses him in touching humility. Gandhi is the prophet of hope in this age of pessimism and disillusionment. He is a promise of sanity in the madness induced by our world's heedless drinking at the fount of war.

Sudhir Kakar

#53. There's constant drama, and I'm busy, busy, but at the center of the madness is the desire to write, the need to write. That desire, that need, is as palpable and relentless as any junkie's craving, and will possess me all day until I can park myself in a chair and do my work.

Jillian Medoff

#54. I saw at least one analysis of the experiment where the author seemed to find it perfectly plausible that if a person was overcome by a violent madness he'd involuntarily start to sound like someone from Louisiana.

Jon Ronson

#55. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

Allen Ginsberg

#56. Madness does not always howl. Sometimes, it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, Hey, is there room in your head for one more?

Despair Inc.

#57. Collections collect collectors. It doesn't work the other way around. A certain object misses its own kind and communicates that to some person who surrounds it with rhyming items; these become at first a quorum, then a selective, addictive madness.

Allan Gurganus

#58. In all societies, women are in double jeopardy; on the one hand we are expected to conform to certain emotional standards in our relationships with others at the penalty of being declared insane; on the other, our political perceptions are labeled "irrational" and "hysterical.

Adrienne Rich

#59. I'm a classic eccentric, living at the extremes of high mania and low mood. There's no middle ground, only madness and sadness.

Fennel Hudson

#60. You carry away with you a reflection of me, a part of me. I dreamed you; I wished for your existence. You will always be a part of my life. If I love you, it must be because we shared, at some moment, the same imaginings, the same madness, the same stage.

Anais Nin

#61. The voice of madness, for instance, is barely a whisper in the babbling history of art because its realities are themselves too maddening to speak of for very long - and those of the Teatro have no voice at all, given their imponderably grotesque nature.

Thomas Ligotti

#62. It was strange what Chris was feeling within, but he didn't mind for he was loving her.

Moffat Machingura

#63. [Jack Sparrow]'s a blast to play. I'll be in a deep, dark depression saying goodbye to him. I'll keep the costume and just prance around the house, entertain the kids ... I mean, at a certain point, the madness must stop, but for the moment, I can't say that he's done.

Johnny Depp

#64. There must be a routine to life, a framework to hang life on. Routines were what kept you sane, gave you something to do at this moment and at that, definite places to go, positive things to do. Abandon it and that way madness lies.

Ruth Rendell

#65. April 43rd 2000
Today is the day of great triumph. There is a king of Spain. He has been found at last. That king is me. I only discovered this today. Frankly, it all came to me in a flash.

Nikolai Gogol

#66. ... I know that if I were mad, after several days of confinement I should take advantage of any lapses in my madness to murder anyone, preferably a doctor, who came near me. At least this would permit me, like the violent, to be confined in solitary. Perhaps they'd leave me alone.

Andre Breton

#67. Looking back at the years I spent in the asylums, I'm now convinced some of that insanity rubbed off onto me!

Stephen Richards

#68. Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent.

Machado De Assis

#69. Magda looks at me as if I've gone mad. Or I've grown up. It's kind of the same thing.

Victoria Schwab

#70. Grant me the stormy seas over a life of ease, the toil and madness of a life of effort, and adventure , and meaning. The safe harbor is not for me, not for long. Let the fearful stand at the shore and point as we head into the unknown, toward that vast horizon where the bold become legend.

Brendon Burchard

#71. (Her husband's departure ... ) had picked Mildred up by the hair and dropped her down at the doorstep of insanity.
From Butterfly on F street

Edward P. Jones

#72. I may play a total madman on TV, but I'm really just a very unbalanced guy at home. However, when it comes to stocks, I believe in being rigorous and methodical, not crazy. There's no madness to my method.

Jim Cramer

#73. 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

#74. The essential truth is that sometimes you're worried that they'll find out it's a fluke, that you don't really have it. You've lost the muse or - the worst dread - you never had it at all. I went through all that madness early on.

Robin Williams

#75. I'm ready to commit to her at any time. But for god's sake, I'm not even sure she's heterosexual. It'd be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions.

Neal Stephenson

#76. And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!

Charles Baudelaire

#77. Madness is like intelligence, you know. You can't explain it. Just like intelligence. It comes on you, it fills you, and then you understand it. But when it goes away you can't understand it at all any longer.

Marguerite Duras

#78. How could you get mad at someone who neither needed to attack nor was at all worried about being able to defend? It was like getting mad at Switzerland.

Karl Marlantes

#79. Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.

Marya Hornbacher

#80. Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.

John Irving

#81. When you are developing something, you have to look at it individually. You can't compare and contrast it to the projects around it, because that way madness lies.

Bryan Fuller

#82. The world is going mad at an accelerating rate and television is the Typhoid Mary of this madness.

Edward Robb Ellis

#83. Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.

Emile M. Cioran

#84. 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

#85. New affairs were exciting but they
were also hard work. The first kiss, the first fuck had some drama. People were interesting at first. Then later, slowly but surely, all the flaws and madness would manifest themselves. I would become less and less to them; they would mean less and less to me.

Charles Bukowski

#86. It took a special kind of madness to try to be a pirate and a good man at the same time.

Matt Myklusch

#87. Wizard's work was a pleasure and a madness. No wonder the university magicians rambled at times like daft bastards.

Lita Burke

#88. Surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity..

William Faulkner

#89. He who without the Muse's madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.

Plato

#90. And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.

Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

Jeanette Winterson

#91. It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time-now, too, I suppose-actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness.

Gore Vidal

#92. Turn away. From the darkness, the madness, the pain. Open your eyes and look at the light.

Jennifer Donnelly

#93. My life has crept so long on a broken wing Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear, That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

#94. Acid gave me a clinical, unblinking look at madness, and I discovered I wasn't brave enough to be insane.

Craig Ferguson

#95. Dancing serves no necessary use, no profitable, laudable, or pious end at all. It is only from the inbred pravity, vanity, wantonness, incontinency, pride, profaneness, or madness of man's depraved nature.

William Prynne

#96. Love was insanity at its most beautiful - a madness of desperation and desire that made the most improbable choice possible.

A Meredith Walters

#97. Just as it would be madness to settle on medical treatment for the body of a person by taking an opinion poll of the neighbors, so it is irrational to prescribe for the body politic by polling the opinions of the people at large.

Plato

#98. You crave chaos. You're happiest when the world is in an uproar. You thrive on madness. Even when your magic is at its best when it's the catalyst to confusion. You still can't admit this?

A.G. Howard

#99. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity
became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a
malady, or a madness, or both.

Oscar Wilde

#100. We all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity. The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity?

G.K. Chesterton