Top 100 The Madness Quotes
#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
#3. 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
#4. I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.
Benjamin Moser
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Each leg of our trip gets worse and worse. I wish someone would knock me unconscious until the madness ended.
Victoria Prince
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.
May Sarton
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom
Hermann Hesse
#22. 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
#23. Sheer madness is, of course, the highest possible brow in humor.
Robert Benchley
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Sanity is found at the centre of convulsion, where madness is scorched
from the bisected soul.
Sarah Kane
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. It doesn't matter if i'm crazy, as long as the madness helps me survive
A.G. Howard
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. No-man's land under snow is like the face of the moon: chaotic, crater ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.
Wilfred Owen
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Sometimes I wonder if the human race isn't collectively as mad as a sack of door knobs.
Jasper Fforde
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. (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
#48. We've stepped off the cliff and are falling into madness.
Ted Dekker
#49. Don't forget love; it will bring you all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.
Meera
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
Joseph Conrad
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Flying high in the dark sky, crazy and free, I was happy visiting the worlds and giving death or madness to the people. Either was liberation.
Lara Biyuts. Vampire Armastus
#59. I've often mused over the idea that madness is actually a sane reaction to an insane world.
Stephanie Ericsson
#61. The nefarious frost that slithers around my spine brings forth concern that Donovan is regressing and needs to be put back on the funny farm, yet my heart longs to surrender in harmony with his madness. Without him, I will never be complete.
Diane Rinella
#62. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I spent a good part of the day making everyone uncomfortable as I stalked Anna, trailing her through Patti's house. And it's just my luck the whole lot would be here to witness my temporary madness - Kope, Zania, Jay, the twins, Blake, and worst of all, Patti.
Wendy Higgins
#63. Perhaps bravery is simply the face humanity wraps around its collective madness.
Amie Kaufman
#64. The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness
Michel Foucault
#65. Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.
Magdalena Abakanowicz
#66. If there's any answer, maybe love can end the madness
Maybe not, oh, but we can only try.
Carole King
#67. By August 2008, we had left Voikovskaya and moved into a wooden dacha in the artists' colony of Sokol in north-west Moscow. The house was a haven amid the madness of the city: lily of the valley grew near our front gate, Virginia creeper decked the green picket fence.
Luke Harding
#68. And never, never, dear madam, put 'Wednesday' simply as the date! That way madness lies!
Lewis Carroll
#69. In general, watching children's television is a dark and surreal descent into madness where the characters on the screen talk directly to you.
John Green
#70. Somewhere deep inside his mind, somewhere beyond the event horizon of rationality, the sheer pressure of insanity had hammered his madness into something harder than diamond.
Terry Pratchett
#71. There is just so much hurt, disappointment, and oppression one can take ... The line between reason and madness grows thinner.
Rosa Parks
#72. Escape is the byword - forwards, backwards, or sideways - into alcohol, busyness, good works, passivity, fantasy, or even madness. For the reality of the present and the immediate future seem even more frightening today
Peter Marshall
#73. 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
#74. Sometimes it seems that the world is a very, very, large, insane asylum. We need only not get caught in others' madness and stick to our own.
Art Hochberg
#75. While Dmitri, as the leader of Raphael's Seven, could not accept such a weakness, the mortal he'd once been, the one who had loved a woman with a wide mouth and eyes of slanted brown ... that man understood what it was to love so deeply it was a kind of beautiful madness.
Nalini Singh
#76. A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership.
John Updike
#77. Madness is however an affliction which in war carries with it the advantage of SURPRISE.
Winston S. Churchill
#78. Like a goddess on her azure hill, the star of my ambition, the mistress of my dream; a thing apart, that we can worship, but not touch; a wild desire, that, in the madness of the thought, soars higher in its dignity, and leaves me weeping in the dust.
William Batchelder Greene
#79. To pursue the impossible is madness: but it is impossible for evil men not to do things of this sort.
Marcus Aurelius
#80. Madness, genius, originality - it's all the same thing; it's a breaking of our normal value structure and the substitution of another one.
Malcolm Bradbury
#81. Whatever happens to me in life, I must believe that somewhere, In the mess or madness of it all, There is a sacred potential -
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#82. Foolishness is doing ignorantly something forbidden repeatedly by sages since ages, and Madness is doing the very same prohibited thing repeatedly but intentionally.
Anuj
#83. There's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness ...
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#85. If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
Socrates
#86. That rational voice was right to be frightened. There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump.
Stephen King
#87. The war had left his body pathetically damaged and weak, but his mind was as strong and clear as it had ever been, perhaps even tempered and made stronger by adversity. That, not madness, was his curse.
Dean Koontz
#88. Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
Edgar Allan Poe
#89. Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#90. "You're drawn to the darkness, to the lawlessness. Drawn to ... "
Morpheus.
Even if Dad doesn't say it out loud, I hear the name echo in the silence.
A.G. Howard
#91. Azhrarn the Beautiful," said Chuz lovingly, "it is your beautiful madness I have come to see.
Tanith Lee
#92. Of all the featherless beasts, only man, chained by his self-imposed slavery to the clock, denies the elemental fire and proceeds as best he can about his business, suffering quietly, martyr to his madness. Much to learn.
Edward Abbey
#93. Madness such as this, its like trying to stop a fire with the moisture from a kiss
Albert Camus
#95. Despite its obscurity, probably no element on the periodic table has as colorful a history as antimony. Money, madness, poison, linguistics, charlatanism, sex - pretty much every theme that runs through the periodic table can be found in Element 51.
Sam Kean
#96. Help us to recognize your voice, help us not to be allured by the madness of the world, so that we may never fall away from you, O Lord Jesus Christ.
Albrecht Durer
#98. The artist treats intuition and nuance with respect and reminds us that a little madness resides in all of us. Artists give voice to feelings, to conflict, to the prism of human experience.
Peter Block
#99. No Chess Grandmaster is normal; they only differ in the extent of their madness
Viktor Korchnoi
#100. Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
Alain De Botton
