Madness Quotes

1. "Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . . . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, . . . to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune. Hema moved gently . . . she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction."
Author: Abraham Verghese

2. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked."
Author: Allen Ginsberg

3. "The first draught serveth for health, the second for pleasure, the third for shame, and the fourth for madness."
Author: Anacharsis

4. "If I love you it means we share the same fantasies, the same madnesses"
Author: Anaïs Nin

5. "My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness."
Author: André Breton

6. "Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason."
Author: Andre Gide

7. "Surreal realized Daemon's madness was confined to emotions, to people, to that single tragedy he couldn't face. It was as if Titian had never died, as if Surreal hadn't spent three years whoring in back alleys before Daemon found her again and arranged for a proper education in a Red Moon house. He thought she was still a child, and he continued to fret about Titian's absence. But when she mentioned a book she was reading, he made a dry observation about her eclectic taste and proceeded to tell her about other books that might be of interest. It was the same with music, with art. They posed no threat to him, had no time frame, weren't part of the nightmare of Jaenelle bleeding on that Dark Altar."
Author: Anne Bishop

8. "God did not live in this church; these statues gave an image to nothingness. I was the supernatural in this cathedral. I was the only Supermortal thing that stood conscious under this roof! Loneliness. Loneliness to the point of madness. The cathedral crumbled in my vision; the saints listed and fell. Rats ate the Holy Eucharist and nested on the sills. A solitary rat with an enormous tail stood tugging and gnawing at the rotted altar cloth until the candlesticks fell and rolled on the slime-covered stones. And I remained standing. Untouched."
Author: Anne Rice

9. "A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!"
Author: Arthur Rimbaud

10. "I don't need to write. Madness or suicide are other options, though not nearly as compelling. But I want to create; I hope to create worlds in my own image, admittedly a self-centered plan. I want others to understand me better, pay more attention to me, like or love me for who I am. Maybe that's it. Or maybe I should simply learn to say, "Let's have lunch."
Author: Chila Woychik

11. "I'm more than the flesh and bone that defines me. More than the pain that consumes me and the madness radiating through me. I am a man. And I am still alive..."
Author: Christine Fonseca

12. "Death is part of who we are. It guidesus. It shapes us. It drives us to madness. Can you still be human if you have no mortal end"
Author: Christopher Paolini

13. "What had I done? Where was my fun? I wanted play, I wanted sun, he was the opposite —I called him Zum because he's an un-fun, the sort of mean-fun bully on the playground-fun. Mean Mr. Zum.This was madness, this was badness this was sadness this was too much un-fun-ness."
Author: Coco J. Ginger

14. "The imagination can be a kind of wilderness, too, in fact a wasteland, if you allow it to take you into one bleak and grotesque place after another, for you can imagine yourself into all kinds of paranoid delusions and even into madness."
Author: Dean Koontz

15. "Longing to travel while you are already traveling is, I admit, a kind of greedy madness"
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

16. "I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies."
Author: Emil Cioran

17. "I hide myself behind, a cloud of smoke; the smoke screen varies, dependent on the variable. The variable consists of: stress, anguish, boredom, madness, anger, depression, apathy, negativity, sex, violence & a little chunk of chaos."
Author: Emily H. Sturgill

18. "Fuck me," I whispered, giving him permission, taking him into my flesh, a soft invitation to madness."
Author: Emme Rollins

19. "Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness"
Author: Erich Segal

20. "Alpha's muzzle curled in disbelief, but he went on watching Fiery intently. "Mad? In what way?" "Insane," Fiery told him. "Like a dog with the water-madness"—at this several Packmembers gasped and growled nervously—"but not that. His jaws foamed and he had fits, but he was in control. Very much in control. He rules his Pack with fear."
Author: Erin Hunter

21. "Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find the means frightening."
Author: Floriano Martins

22. "Wherever life and knowledge seemed to contradict each other, there was never any serious struggle: in such cases, denial and doubt amounted to madness."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

23. "Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.""How terrible," said Farukhuaz."Do you think so? I find it reassuring. It saves me from having to divine meaning in every sorrow that comes my way."
Author: G. Willow Wilson Alif The Unseen

24. "It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them."
Author: Jeanette Winterson

25. "It is madness to make fortune the mistress of events, because by herself she is nothing and is ruled by prudence."
Author: John Dryden

26. "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 in the world."
Author: John Updike

27. "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."
Author: Karen Joy Fowler

28. "But madness? That small remnant of altered consciousness, pure or in response to circumstances. Circumstances of life, even those of the body itself and its chemistry. How cruel and stupid to punish this as we do with ostracism and fear, to have forged a network of fear, strong as the locks and bars of a back ward. This is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime."
Author: Kate Millett

29. "They had engaged in what could not be called treatment or even discussion, but open combat, the two of them a microcosm of the great war raging in the far distance: one side that desired autonomy, and the other that took independence as a sign of madness."
Author: Kathy Hepinstall

30. "Papa," she said easily, happily, walking across the park with him to the Albert Hall. "What is it like to be in love?""Oh, it's marvellous," he said. "Or terrible. Or both. The Romans saw it as a fit of madness that you wouldn't wish on anybody. But there's nothing you can do about it, that's the main thing."
Author: Louisa Young

31. "If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness."
Author: Ludwig Wittgenstein

32. "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."
Author: Luke Harding

33. "It's a circle of madness and deception I can't decipher."
Author: Marata Eros

34. "I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met."
Author: Marguerite Duras

35. "During the earliest attacks of Fear and intense unreality, I sometimes uttered these unconscious and shocking words: 'I should prefer to escape into madness to avoid this consuming fear.' Alas, I did not know what I was saying. In my ignorance I believed that madness was a state of insensibility where there was neither pain nor suffering nor joy, but particularly, no responsibility. Never, for one instant, has I even imagined what 'to lose one's reason' actually meant."
Author: Marguerite Sechehaye

36. "I rehearsed Foucault's argument that the presence of madness on our doorstep is good for us, for it reminds us the life we live is only one among several human possibilities."
Author: Michael Greenberg

37. "By now it's March, and it's too late to start another new year's resolution: you'll simply have to wait until December 31st again. Everybody knows you can't start something new in March. That would be ridiculous. Similar to starting a diet on a Thursday. Madness. (All diets start on a Monday, as on the Thursday before you start you have to eat everything out of your fridge and cupboards for the following Monday. It's a marvellous system.)"
Author: Miranda Hart

38. "In either mythology, ancient Irish or modern Jungian, we see the struggle to arrive at a workable arrangement with the forces of Nature, so that we neither try to triumph over her nor naively succumb to her. The first strategy leads to a sense of inflation and emotional sterility, the second to madness."
Author: Peter O'Connor

39. "This is called a piqué machine, it sews that finest stitch, called piqué, requires far more skill than the other stitches.... This is called a polishing machine and that is called a stretcher and you are called honey and I am called Daddy and this is called living and the other is called dying and this is called madness and this is called mourning and this is called hell, pure hell, and you have to have strong ties to be able to stick it out, this is called trying-to-go-on-as-though-nothing-has-happened and this is called paying-the-full-price-but-in-God's-name-for-what, this is called wanting-to-be-dead-and-wanting-to-find-her-and-to-kill-her-and-to-save-her-from-whatever-she-is-going-through-wherever-on-earth-she-may-be-at-this-moment, this unbridled outpouring is called blotting-out-everything and it does not work, I am half insane, the shattering force of that bomb is too great ... And then they were back at his office again."
Author: Philip Roth

40. "It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting."
Author: Richard Russo

41. "Isn't it the task of the Holy Spirit to introduce some madness and intoxication into the world? Why this propensity for balance and safety? Don't we all long for one moment of raw risk, one moment of divine madness?"
Author: Ron Rolheiser

42. "And to be wroth with one we love…Doth work like madness in the brain."
Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

43. "In the closed world of the gynaeceum, despite the gardens and parkland extending beyong the horizon, despite the insurmountable walls separating pavillions and palaces, the tangled web of our fate was inescapable. Why did these women love each other to the point of madness? Why did they loathe one another so vehemently, and why did sworn enemies feel such horror and fascination for one another? Why should furious hate become obsession, then intoxication and the very reason to live?Because love and hate were the two heads of the demon."
Author: Shan Sa

44. "I did like Phoebe. In spite of her wild tales and her cholestreal madness and her annoying comment, there was something about Phoebe that was like a magnet. I was drawn to her. I was pretty sure that underneath all that odd behavior was someone who was frightened. And, in a strange way, sh was like another version of me-she acted out the way I sometimes felt."
Author: Sharon Creech Walk Two Moons

45. "He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility."
Author: Stephen King

46. "That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes."
Author: Steven Millhauser

47. "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."
Author: Sudhir Kakar

48. "My emotions were like a crowd. Give 'em what they want. Barabbas or the J-man. There's gonna be a crucifixion. Well, more or less. Because if you ask me, purveyor of useless facts, the promise of sex with someone you're starting to like puts you smack dab in the centre of time, history, and the universe itself. Right there in West Oakland no less. The birth of a new religion, and all the madness that ensues."
Author: Trebor Healey

49. "As she walked, the horror stories she'd heard from Felix and the others became real. This is what their underground efforts were fighting against. These camps, these guards, were reality to thousands of people... Reality to the person who had just made the trip up the chimney. If they did not stop this madness, it would be the end of them all."
Author: Tricia Goyer

50. "When those we love are in question, our prudence invents every sort of madness."
Author: Victor Hugo

Madness Quotes Pictures