“One would go mad if one took the Bible seriously; but to take it seriously one must be already mad.”

“The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness […] One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.”

“I believed all along,
one day
everyone would go mad
just to see me sane.”

“Myself, I suspect it’s a kind of madness: the madness that makes one repeat whatever one is trained to repeat.”

“Of course I’ve gone mad with power! Have you ever tried going mad without power? It’s boring and no one listens to you!
— Russ Cargill”

“I'm the last of the mad ones.”

“These are primitive beginnings in art, such as one usually finds in ethnographic collections or at home in one's nursery. Do not laugh, reader! Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us; and they must be preserved from corruption at an early age. Parallel phenomena are provided by the works of the mentally diseased; neither childish behaviour nor madness are insulting words here, as they commonly are. All this is to be taken very seriously, more seriously than all the public galleries, when it comes to reforming today's art.”

“One is always half mad when one is shy of people.”

“Each sex has a relation to madness. Every desire has a relation to madness. But it would seem that one desire has been taken as wisdom, moderation, truth, leaving to the other sex the weight of a madness that cannot be acknowledged or accommodated.”

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”