Quotes about madness

“So you're a tough guy
Like-it-really-rough guy
Just-can't-get-enough guy
Chest-always-so-puffed guy
I'm that bad type
Make-your-mama-sad type
Make-your-girlfriend-mad type
Might-seduce-your-dad type
I'm the bad guy, duh
I'm the bad guy”

“Mad Matter: "Have I gone mad?"
Alice: "I'm afraid so. You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”

“If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.”

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

“Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter”

“To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.”

“Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then — as I am listening now.”

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"”

“Every day I discover
more and more
beautiful things.
It’s enough to drive one mad.
I have such a desire
to do everything,
my head is bursting with it.”

“There is a place, like no place on earth. A land full of wonder, mystery, and danger. Some say, to survive it, you need to be as mad as a hatter. Which, luckily, I am.”

“If in life we are surrounded by death, then in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.”

“I don't know if I ever really get mad in real life. It's what my shrink was saying to me all those years: You need to get mad! I think rage is so ugly. I just think there's a way to be mad and discuss it.”

“To me the war was an abomination, a madness, a crime, and from the first moment onwards–more out of impulse than reflection–I inwardly rejected it and could never reconcile myself with it up to this very moment.”

“Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.”

“Humor is reason gone mad.”

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”

“If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!”

“Do you understand? Man needs entertainment simply to hide his madness. If he was perfectly sane, he would not need entertainment. He could just sit and watch this bamboo grow. He does not really need entertainment.”

“If you have an enemy, then learn and know your enemy, don't just be mad at him or her”

“Don't forget love;
it will bring all the madness you need
to unfurl yourself across the universe.”

“I feel the madness creeping slowly. Loved by many I'm still lonely.”

“Lyrically I'm untouchable, uncrushable. Getting mad blunted in the S-500.”

“It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours.”

“Man is sick and nations have gone mad.
You would not even tolerate for one moment the conduct in an individual that is commonplace in the acts of some nations. You would lock up such a person.”

“If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it.”

“For me it’s hurtful. I get mad when people assume things about me because I imagine the people who don’t have the support system I have and how that must affect them.”

“Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.”

“I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars…. I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness….”

“People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.”

“I think I am mad sometimes.”

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I can not find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”

“I was stark raving mad, and my family was too polite to mention it. That's what living with the Yamanis does to people. They get so well-mannered they won't mention you're crazy.”

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness.”

“He stood up straight and looked the world squarely in the fields and hills. To add weight to his words he stuck the rabbit bone in his hair. He spread his arm out wide. "I will go mad!" he annouced.”

“Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.”

“I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.”

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

“All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”

“I am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be.”

“Love is merely a madness.”

“The american dream wasn't meant for me, cause lady liberty's a hypocrite she lied to me, promised me freedom, education, and equality never gave me nothing but slavery but now look at how dangerous you made me callin me a mad man because im strong and bold.”

“I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.”

“What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?”

“God the Almighty has made our rulers mad; they actually think they can do—and order their subjects to do—whatever they please. And the subjects make the mistake of believing that they, in turn, are bound to obey their rulers in everything.”

“The old pain had started up again, throbbing in my chest, stomach, bones. It wasn't healthy to be encased in a body for so long. How humans can stand it without going completely mad, I'll never know.†
† Then again… maybe that explains a lot.”

“Skin head Dead head,
Everybody gone bad,
Situation, Aggravation,
Everybody allegation,
In the suite, On the news,
Everybody dogfood,
Bang Bang, Shot dead,
Everybody gone mad”

“Billie and I got chased through the traffic once in a car. You expect paparazzi to do that, but when it's normal people you start to think the world's gone a bit mad.”

“But what first motivated me wasn’t anything I read. I just got mad seeing the machines ripping up the woods.”

“Proud of my near-madness, as if I had attained a goal.”

“All innovators, logically speaking, have been Futurists in relation to their time. Palestrina would have thought that Bach was crazy, and Bach would have thought Beethoven the same, and Beethoven would have thought Wagner equally so.
Rossini liked to boast that he had finally understood the music of Wagner—by reading it backward; Verdi, after listening to the overture to Tannhäuser, wrote to a friend that Wagner was mad.
So we stand at the window of a glorious mental hospital, even while we unhesitatingly declare that counterpoint and the fugue, which even today are still considered the most important branches of musical instruction…”

“You’re in total isolation. And you don’t know how long you’re going to be there, but you truly believe they can do anything to you. There’s no way to even question it. You’re not protected by anything. Why am I here? Your mind is very uncertain of time. You become like mad. It’s very hard for anyone. Even for people who have strong beliefs.”

“I would like to leave behind me the conviction that if we maintain a certain amount of caution and organization we deserve victory. … You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. … We must dare to invent the future.”

“Cause baby now we got bad blood.
You know it used to be mad love.
So take a look at what you've done.
'Cause baby now we got bad blood.”

“On my Youtube page there are so many haters. They just say crazy stuff. Like, I'm not mad. I'm 16 years old and I don't have chest hair and I'm not angry about it at the moment. That will come. People are like, "Look at him he puts helium in his voice before he sings."”

“Baby, if I made you mad
For something I might have said,
Please, let's forget the past,
The future looks bright ahead.
Don't be cruel to a heart that's true.
I don't want no other love,
Baby it's just you I'm thinking of.”

“Manhood stands tall and high, and becomes madness;
The self takes leave of being and becomes ecstasy.
When iron sated with blood embraces love,
It turns into a bewildered sitar string.
When time robs man of love and the loved one,
He sees the beloved’s glory and his own.
How man sprouts when he sits down in dust!”

“I myself am no longer very much afflicted by the thought of my own death. The synthesis, Peter Wessel Zapffe, did not originate until 1899. It was spared from immediate participation in the horrors of the previous years, and it will not miss what awaits mankind at the end of its vertiginous madness.”

“Everything I ever projected New York to be, it was—even the stinky, ratty, vomity part of it. Everybody has to do the subway. Everybody has to smell the same smells. And people get mad all the time. When people don’t like something, like ‘Get out of my way you blah, blah, blah.’ But [in L. A. ] it’s like, ‘How ya doing? Let’s do lunch! I love you!”

“…the madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings…”

“So now we come to what Andrea Dworkin wants and it is this: she wants women to have their own country. But that's mad, I said to her. Why bother discussing it? It isn't going to happen. To which she has a reply -- didn't they say that about Israel? And didn't the world think that Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, was a crank? The Jews got a country because they had been persecuted, said that enough was enough, decided what they wanted and went out and fought for it. Women should do the same. And if you don't want to live in Womenland, so what? Not all Jews live in Israel, but it is there, a place of potential refuge if persecution comes to call. Furthermore, Dworkin says, as the Jews fought for Israel so women have the right to execute -- that's right, execute -- rapists and the state should not intervene. I couldn't really believe she was serious, but she is.”

“There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.”

“And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.”
Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.

“And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?”

“Never allow yourself to become comfortable for that is when fear is guiding your decisions. Confronting fear can be exciting and exhilarating. Let others believe your mad. Only you require truth.”

“When love is not madness it is not love.”

“It was sad, like those businessmen who came to work in serious clothes but wore colorful ties in a mad, desperate attempt to show there was a free spirit in there somewhere.”

“In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too”

“Yet but three come one more.
Two of both kinds make up four.
Ere she comes curst and sad.
Cupid is a knavish lad.
Thus to make poor females mad.”

“[Thou] mad mustachio purple-hued maltworms!”

“Madness is the emergency exit. You can just step outside, and close the door on all those dreadful things that happened. You can lock them away…forever."
The Joker”

“We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

“The Mad Hatter: "Would you like some wine?"
Alice: "Yes…"
The Mad Hatter: "We haven't any and you're too young.”

“To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.”

“There is the heat of Love,
the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover's whisper,
irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.”

“You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest.”

“Quos vilt perdere dementat' Whome the gods wish to destroy, they first drive mad (Latin).”

“I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.”

“His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.”

“I could not help feeling that they were evil things -- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.”

“I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices”

“Is it the sea you hear in me?
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.”

“Why is a raven like a writing desk? - Mad Hatter
I haven't the slightest idea. - Alice”

“Without madness what is man
more than the healthy beast,
corpse adjourned that procreates?”

“Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cured is that the lunacy is so
ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”

“His will is our hiding place. Lord Jesus, keep me in your will! Don't let me go mad by poking about outside of it!”

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition.”

“We're all mad here. Im mad. You're mad”

“I am not mad because I'm a woman… I'm mad because you're an asshole.”

“There was no more good or evil in this world than we imagine there to be, either out of greed or out of innocence. Or sometimes madness.”

“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”

“Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories”

“You would be amazed how many magicians have died after being bitten by mad rabbits. It's far more common than you might think.
-Angela the Herbalist”

“I'm mad about the waste that happens when people who love each other can't even bring themselves to talk.”

“All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful, but the beauty is grim.”

“Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don’t you?”

“Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.”