quotations about madness
Oh! thou who art greatly mad, deign to spare me who am less mad.
HORACE
Satires
He appears mad indeed but to a few, because the majority is infected with the same disease.
HORACE
Satires
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.
YANN MARTEL
Life of Pi
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
Letters
People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room
Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life.
C. G. JUNG
The Red Book
I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
The Madman
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does not spring from disease of thought--from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Eleonora"
Mental illness is still seen as a scourge of the Lord. Freud and his offspring turned it into a much more sophisticated scourge. But even for him it is essentially a state of distress resulting from how you have lived your life and how your parents lived theirs. And that is biblical leprosy, not the common cold.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Dhalgren
Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.
BALTASAR GRACIAN
The Art of Worldly Wisdom
Whom the gods destroy they first make mad.
ROBERT E. HOWARD
Kull: Exile of Atlantis
Madness hath imaginary bliss, and most men have no more.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Temple"
The madman is ... confused. He muddles ego with self, inner with outer, natural and supernatural. Nevertheless, he often can be to us, even through his profound wretchedness and disintegration, the hierophant of the sacred. An exile from the scene of being as we know it, he is an alien, a stranger, signalling to us from the void in which he is foundering. This void may be peopled by presences that we do not even dream of. They used to be called demons and spirits, that were known and named. He has lost his sense of self, his feelings, his place in the world as we know it. He tells us he is dead. But we are distracted from our cozy security by this mad ghost that haunts us with his visions and voices that seem so senseless and of which we feel impelled to rid him, cleanse him, cure him.
R. D. LAING
"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964
There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
Without madness what is man
But a wholesome beast,
Postponed corpse that begets?
FERNANDO PESSOA
"D. Sebastião"
Madness is simpler than it looks: it is our effort to express unbearable pain.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity
Why is it that madness holds such a fascination to human societies the world over? What is it about the "imbalance" of those afflicted that spurs us on to write about, paint, dramatize and immortalize in our legends caricatures of suffering people?
JONATHAN BURNS
The Descent of Madness: Evolutionary Origins of Psychosis and the Social Brain
The brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Tender Is the Night
Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.
MARYA HORNBACHER
Madness: A Bipolar Life