Top 100 Quotes About Madness
#1. 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
#2. 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
#4. I am mad, and I embrace it. Madness is part of my heritage.
A.G. Howard
#6. As he thought about his life, he felt both tears and mockery welling up inside him. All that lay before him was madness or suicide. He walked down the darkening street alone, determined now to wait for the destiny that would come to annihilate him.
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
#7. I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.
Benjamin Moser
#8. Then since we mortal lovers are, Ask not how long our love will last; But while it does, let us take care Each minute be with pleasure past: Were it not madness to deny To live because we're sure to die?
Paul Negri
#9. 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
#10. I have a suspicion that you are all mad,' said Dr. Renard, smiling sociably; 'but God forbid that madness should in any way interrupt friendship.
G.K. Chesterton
#11. It is madness and a contradiction to expect that things which were never yet performed should be effected, except by means hitherto untried.
Francis Bacon
#12. There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness.
Sam Peckinpah
#13. The madness of Christmas is not to be resisted by any human means. It either stealthily creeps or crudely batters its way into every fastness or fortress of prudence all over the land.
Patrick Hamilton
#14. What is madness To those who only observe, is often wisdom To those to whom it happens.
Christopher Fry
#15. Riotous madness,
To be entangled with those mouth-made vows,
Which break themselves in swearing!
William Shakespeare
#16. Madness. That's what it was. And I could no longer contain it.
Melanie Harlow
#17. 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
#18. In his madness and his blindness he was Lear and Gloucester combined.
Susanna Clarke
#19. Each leg of our trip gets worse and worse. I wish someone would knock me unconscious until the madness ended.
Victoria Prince
#20. When it fails, they do call it madness, Lazarus. But when it succeeds, they call it genius.
Erika Johansen
#22. I don't necessarily find superheroes in general, for me, that appealing. I'd much prefer to play, if I was to be cast in a superhero film, I'd prefer to play the villain because there's a reason, there's a motive behind their madness.
Ryan Kwanten
#23. Armed with madness, I go on a long voyage.
Mary Butts
#25. Terrorism is an example of that extreme madness. People blow themselves up just to kill others. Unconscious reaction to terrorism is equal madness.
Eckhart Tolle
#26. Dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.
Joseph Conrad
#27. There is wisdom in madness, and strong probability of truth in all accusations, for people are complete, and everybody is capable of everything.
Joseph Heller
#28. 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
#30. Writing is a form of licensed madness.
Mal Peet
#32. That was madness. You're never going to bring one of those down with a handgun.
Sean Penn
#33. The classic business story is much like the classic human story. There is rise and fall; the overcoming of great odds, the upholding of principles despite the cost, questions of rivalry and succession, and even the possibility of descent into madness.
Mark Helprin
#34. You will certainly grant me that neither antiquity nor whatever nation has devised a more repulsive and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating your God. This is the most disgusting dogma of Christian religion, the greatest insult to the Highest Being, the climax of madness and insanity.
Frederick The Great
#35. Watching people party is cool, but I don't love watching people get super-duper trashed and annoying. I feel protected behind my booth - away from the madness, but a part of it too.
Taryn Manning
#36. I believe,' Muswell once said, 'that mental isolation is the essence of weird fiction. Isolation when confronted with disease, with madness, with horror and with death. These are the reverberations of the infinity that torments us.
("The White Hands")
Mark Samuels
#37. To drive free, to love free, to court destruction with taunts. One brief house of madness and joy!
Walt Whitman
#38. Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.
G. M. Trevelyan
#39. New York had pushed and bent and bullied, driving me underground to sort out the madness and sculpt my Being with my own hands in self-discovery on its cold pottery wheel and in the white heat of its kiln. The City enabled me to learn who I really was, as a pixelated man and member of Humanity.
David B. Lentz
#40. Gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.
May Sarton
#41. You might never comprehend my madness. But it stands behind my undying love for you. You're the object of my everything. I'm sorry I've been stupid lately.
Crystal Woods
#43. Madness doesn't get off wearing gloves. It needs to feel skin on skin, smell the blood and shit as it brings itself off.
Benjamin R. Smith
#44. We are all gripped in madness. I have never seen the like nor heard of such a thing - gods, what we have become ...
Steven Erikson
#45. Madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom
Hermann Hesse
#46. No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is.
Mark Twain
#47. Libri quosdam ad scientiam, quosdam ad insaniam deduxere. (Books have led some to knowledge and some to madness.)
Francesco Petrarca
#48. I believe we will see a biofuels resurgence. While gas prices skyrocket and we continue to wage wars for oil, while spills, fracking, tar sands and the oil madness of our empire continue, people are waking up and realizing that you can't be against petroleum and against fuels that come from nature.
Josh Tickell
#49. I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.
Gary Shteyngart
#50. Sheer madness is, of course, the highest possible brow in humor.
Robert Benchley
#51. 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
#52. You can choose to be mad in a negative
way where it fuels you to do
mean, hateful things, or you can let
your madness fuel your art and
channel it in a positive way.
Allie Gonino
#53. They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad. This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.
Lev Shestov
#54. Every great genius has an admixture of madness.
Aristotle.
#55. Truth, terrible truth! It is like an ancient curse, from which there is no escape. The truth will drive one mad. Yet without it, how can one make sense of life's madness?
Maryrose Wood
#56. And everyone was selecting their leaders not by their ability to lead, but by where they stood on this single issue. It was beyond madness.
Neal Shusterman
#57. The grace of his walk could save me if I am crippled. His name on my lips could be my prayer against the madness of the world.
Cameron Jace
#58. Sanity is found at the centre of convulsion, where madness is scorched
from the bisected soul.
Sarah Kane
#59. There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.
Geraldine Brooks
#60. Madness is badness of spirit, when one seeks profit from all
sources.
Aristotle.
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Go! you may call it madness, folly; You shall not chase my gloom away! There 's such a charm in melancholy I would not if I could be gay.
Samuel Rogers
#64. I had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to the body.
Joseph Conrad
#65. It doesn't matter if i'm crazy, as long as the madness helps me survive
A.G. Howard
#66. 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
#67. Sometimes it takes a little madness to fulfill great things.
Melissa Kuch
#68. It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to a normal madness.
John N. Gray
#69. They all want to get to the throne: this is their madness - as if happiness were sitting on the throne! Often it is mud that sits on the throne - and often the throne also sits on mud.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#70. Whoever heard me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#71. It is folly to anticipate evils, and madness to create imaginary ones.
John Adams
#72. 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
#73. It is madness for sheep to talk peace with a wolf.
Thomas Fuller
#74. 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
#75. To be heroic may mean nothing more than this then, to stand in the face of the status quo, in the face of an easy collapse into the madness of an increasingly chaotic world and represent another way.
Mike Alsford
#76. Sir William said he never spoke of 'madness'; he called it not having a sense of proportion.
Virginia Woolf
#77. I wanted to see something in full daylight; I was sated with the pleasure and comfort of the half light; I had the same desire for the daylight as for water and air. And if seeing was fire, I required the plenitude of fire, and if seeing would infect me with madness, I madly wanted that madness.
Maurice Blanchot
#78. No-man's land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.
Wilfred Owen
#79. I do love the sound of ripping corn husks. The violence of the noise, the sustained popping and shoring of the silky organic threads, made me think of someone tearing up an expensive and potentially Italian set of trousers in a fit of madness that this person just might regret later.
Reif Larsen
#80. Much Madness Is Divinest Sense
Much Madness is divinest Sense
To a discerning Eye
Much Sense - the starkest Madness
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail
Assent - and you are sane
Demur - you're straightway dangerous
And handled with a Chain -
Emily Dickinson
#81. Error in extremis - extremely pure, extremely persistent, or extremely peculiar - becomes insanity. madness is radical wrongness.
Kathryn Schulz
#82. Sometimes I wonder if the human race isn't collectively as mad as a sack of door knobs.
Jasper Fforde
#83. Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn't know. That's why he was devouring two or three books a day - to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life.
Philip Roth
#84. Eighty-six percent of the gun death of children under the age of 14 internationally is right here in the United States of America. It is madness.
Nita Lowey
#85. (aside) Oh, you are well tuned now,
But I'll set down the pegs that make this music,
As honest as I am.
William Shakespeare
#86. We've stepped off the cliff and are falling into madness.
Ted Dekker
#87. Don't forget love; it will bring you all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.
Meera
#88. Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.
John Russell
#89. Creative vision creates art" - he motioned around the gallery - "that shows the rest of the world a new angle. That's beautiful thing."
"Or some sort of madness", she said.
Melissa Marr
#90. Another blast from Rivenrock shivered the air. It snatched Mhoram's head up, and he faced Covenant with tears streaming down his cheeks. "It is as I have said," he breathed achingly. "Madness is not the only danger in dreams."
Stephen R. Donaldson
#92. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
Joseph Conrad
#93. 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
#94. Underwater madness slipping into a haze, drowning and choking in repugnant nostalgic thoughts.
Karen Quan
#95. Let love be your constant state of being. Do not fear love, do not fear to be owned by love and its subtle madness, for why should you be fearful of that which owns you already.
Maha Khalid
#96. If monks are crazy to live the way they do, maybe the world needs more such craziness, what Matthew Kelty has termed 'the madness of great love.' My narrow world had just opened wide, and I had glimpsed such a love.
Kathleen Norris
#97. The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies. Unnamable things have come to us in alien horror and will come again.
Clark Ashton Smith
#98. It is well known that lust brings madness and desperation and ruin. But upon my oath, I never meant any harm. All I wanted was to be happy, to love and to be loved in return, and for my life to count for something.
That is not madness, is it?
Fiona Mountain
#99. He forgot that love, which is a madness, and a scourge, and a fever, and a delusion, and a snare, is also a mystery, and very imperfectly understood by everyone except the individual sufferer who writhes under its tortures.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
#100. When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.
George Bernard Shaw
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