Best 930 quotes in «madness quotes» category

About his madmen Mr. Lecky was no more certain. He knew less than the little to be learned of the causes or even of the results of madness. Yet for practical purposes one can imagine all that is necessary. As long as maniacs walk like men, you must come close to them to penetrate so excellent a disguise. Once close, you have joined the true werewolf. Pick for your companion a manic-depressive, afflicted by any of the various degrees of mania - chronic, acute, delirious. Usually more man than wolf, he will be instructive. His disorder lies in the very process of his thinking, rather than in the content of his thought. He cannot wait a minute for the satisfaction of his fleeting desires or the fulfillment of his innumerable schemes. Nor can he, for two minutes, be certain of his intention or constant in any plan or agreement. Presently you may hear his failing made manifest in the crazy concatenation of his thinking aloud, which psychiatrists call "flight of ideas." Exhausted suddenly by this riotous expense of speech and spirit, he may subside in an apathy dangerous and morose, which you will be well advised not to disturb. Let the man you meet be, instead, a paretic. He has taken a secret departure from your world. He dwells amidst choicest, most dispendious superlatives. In his arm he has the strength to lift ten elephants. He is already two hundred years old. He is more than nine feet high; his chest is of iron, his right leg is silver, his incomparable head is one whole ruby. Husband of a thousand wives, he has begotten on them ten thousand children. Nothing is mean about him; his urine is white wine; his faeces are always soft gold. However, despite his splendor and his extraordinary attainments, he cannot successfully pronounce the words: electricity, Methodist Episcopal, organization, third cavalry brigade. Avoid them. Infuriated by your demonstration of any accomplishment not his, he may suddenly kill you. Now choose for your friend a paranoiac, and beware of the wolf! His back is to the wall, his implacable enemies are crowding on him. He gets no rest. He finds no starting hole to hide him. Ten times oftener than the Apostle, he has been, through the violence of the unswerving malice which pursues him, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of his own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Now that, face to face with him, you simulate innocence and come within his reach, what pity can you expect? You showed him none; he will certainly not show you any. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, 0 Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. Mr. Lecky's maniacs lay in wait to slash a man's head half off, to perform some erotic atrocity of disembowelment on a woman. Here, they fed thoughtlessly on human flesh; there, wishing to play with him, they plucked the mangled Tybalt from his shroud. The beastly cunning of their approach, the fantastic capriciousness of their intention could not be very well met or provided for. In his makeshift fort everywhere encircled by darkness, Mr. Lecky did not care to meditate further on the subject.

Act – make an event. Smash the coordinates and see where the smithereens fly. Let in the madness, and be sure to be a danger to oneself and others. Too much thinking turns you into that fool Hamlet.

A demon seduced an angel in the middle of the night and they gave the stars a glimpse. There was nothing casual about it, it was tender skin and battle scars breathless passion under storm clouds a rapid river stream mirroring the moon light. Until one day, he left her with nothing, just a bruised heart and carved memories iridescent wings chipped on the edges heat under her skin, like an ember burning low. I asked her, "What do you do after a love like that?" She laughed. And madness danced behind her eyes. But she flew so high the world was jealous.

A doctor once asked me: 'Charlie, what do you think your problem is?' “Doc,' I said, '…you’re the problem!

A genius flirts with madness.

A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves

Ah, brothers, this God which I created was human work and human madness, like all gods! He was human, and only a poor piece of man and Ego: this phantom came to me from my own fire and ashes, that is the truth! It did not come from the ‘beyond’!

A little madness shows the way to happiness. A little kindness can heal the sadness.

Alice asked the Cheshire Cat who was sitting in a tree "What road do I take?" The cat asked, "Where do you want to go?" "I don't know " answered Alice. "Then, said the cat, it really doesn't matter, does it?

All love stories are not same, perhaps a little madness makes it special.

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

All habits are bad habits. (...) Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

All men are mad in some way or another, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too, the rest of the world.

All belief is a form of voluntary madness.

All Mad" 'He is mad as a hare, poor fellow, And should be in chains,' you say, I haven't a doubt of your statement, But who isn't mad, I pray? Why, the world is a great asylum, And the people are all insane, Gone daft with pleasure or folly, Or crazed with passion and pain. The infant who shrieks at a shadow, The child with his Santa Claus faith, The woman who worships Dame Fashion, Each man with his notions of death, The miser who hoards up his earnings, The spendthrift who wastes them too soon, The scholar grown blind in his delving, The lover who stares at the moon. The poet who thinks life a paean, The cynic who thinks it a fraud, The youth who goes seeking for pleasure, The preacher who dares talk of God, All priests with their creeds and their croaking, All doubters who dare to deny, The gay who find aught to wake laughter, The sad who find aught worth a sigh, Whoever is downcast or solemn, Whoever is gleeful and gay, Are only the dupes of delusions— We are all of us—all of us mad.

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in a strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.

All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.

A madman overcomes it by adapting to his surroundings. You can’t give up. Why die? There is always another mission; it’s the missions that keep you alive.

Almost every woman I have ever met has a secret belief that she is just on the edge of madness, that there is some deep, crazy part within her, that she must be on guard constantly against ‘losing control’ — of her temper, of her appetite, of her sexuality, of her feelings, of her ambition, of her secret fantasies, of her mind.

A man swallowed a bird every day but still couldn't fly.

All they see is madness. It’s the same with the other men. They see my situation, not me.

A logical method is madness to one who isn't taught to understand it. - The Malwatch

A loon thought he was Frank Sinatra and every time Frank came on TV or radio the loon would go mad, impostor!

Always at the same time, at half past four, he visited the woman who once had been a stranger to him, a woman who in her madness confused all the facts of living, who saw things as they were not and people as they were not, who turned everything upside down and inside out.

A moment of anger is a moment of resentment and madness which can burn your heart.

A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.

& he watches each muscle volt into place. the surgeon became the surgeon after years of opening books & making sense of their contents

An artist must be passionately in love with her art. Obsessed or possessed ― go mad for what you believe in.

And he wonders, deep in the self-isolated recesses of his mind whether he is killing himself with anger, whether he is destroying his system with fury.

And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.

And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?

And never, never, dear madam, put 'Wednesday' simply as the date! That way madness lies!

...and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.

And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go.

And we cannot keep our balance. Myth gives way to Reason. Revelation to Orthodoxy. We must dance or go mad.

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.

And what's God if not a puppeteer...one who makes us dance...one who craves and demands attention?

An exaltation of spirit lifted me, as it were, far above the earth and the sinful creatures crawling on its surface; and I deemed myself as an eagle among the children of men, soaring on high, and looking down with pity and contempt on the grovelling creatures below.

April 43rd 2000 Today is the day of great triumph. There is a king of Spain. He has been found at last. That king is me. I only discovered this today. Frankly, it all came to me in a flash.

A person who is another man's slave is better than one who is a slave to lust.

Anger is like sex urge, once gratified, the inner voice calls you a stinking fool.

An intense life needs a touch of madness.

Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn't this happen every day?

As a comedian, the more you commit the sin of stupidity, three essential things happen to your life: ~people applaud you incessantly. ~love you more than their parents. ~give you a daily bread.

Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I'll walk myself home.

As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad . . .

Asylums are crazy places, with crazy rules. If you’re not mad when you arrive, you are when you leave. (That’s if you ever leave.) I was lucky…I got slung out; they couldn’t afford to keep me any longer.

Ask anybody, would you want an ex-madman living next door? It’s difficult enough being an ex-convict. It’s double hard for us ‘madmen’. Please believe it.

As long as he deceived himself about the truth, he could blame fortune and have confidence in the future. Now the clouds of madness were closing round his mind.