Madness Quotes - Page 13

• All power of fancy over reason is a degree of madness.

  Samuel Johnson

  Degrees, Fancy, Reason

  Samuel Johnson (1836). “Johnsoniana; or supplement to Boswell; being Anecdotes and sayings of Dr. Johnson, etc”, p.390

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• If the will, which in the law of our nature, were withdrawn from our memory, fancy, understanding, and reason, no other hell could equal, for a spiritual being, what we should then feel from the anarchy of our powers. It would be conscious madness,--a horrid thought!

  John Milton

  Spiritual, Memories, Law

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• Acid gave me a clinical, unblinking look at madness, and I discovered I wasn't brave enough to be insane.

  Craig Ferguson

  Brave, Insane, Looks

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• [Gambling] is a perfidious passion. ... It is bad for one to win, and bad not to win. ... it ends by setting your blood on fire, and to increase your chances of winning at any cost, your stakes increase frightfully; the desire of winning gets to be a madness. The soul gets sick; it neither sees nor hears anything. No family ties, position, nor fortune, can stand against this passion.

  Matilde Serao

  Passion, Winning, Blood

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• Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics - one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis.

  Michael Ignatieff

  Multicultural Society, Land, Differences

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• Chance is the nature of our universe. [...] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.

  Frank Herbert

  Chance, Surprise, Valuable

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• The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained.

  Claire Messud

  Dream, Children, Husband

  Claire Messud (2013). “The Woman Upstairs”, p.18, Vintage

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• For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Revenge, Ordinary, World

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• Intoxicated with madness, I'm in love with my sadness

  Sylvia Plath

  Sadness, Intoxicated

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• The real madness probably is not another thing that the wisdom itself that, tired of discovering the shames of the world, has taken the intelligent resolution to become mad

  Heinrich Heine

  Real, Taken, Tired

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• But there is no such man; for, brother, men
  Can counsel and speak comfort to that grief
  Which they themselves not feel; but, tasting it,
  Their counsel turns to passion, which before
  Would give preceptial medicine to rage,
  Fetter strong madness in a silken thread,
  Charm ache with air and agony with words.

  William Shakespeare

  Strong, Brother, Grief

  William Shakespeare (2016). “The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition: The Complete Works”, p.1491, Oxford University Press

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• We're capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.

  Jo Nesbo

  Cutting, Understanding, Bombs

  Jo Nesbo (2010). “The Snowman: Harry Hole 7”, p.245, Random House

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• Confronted with this double madness of the labourers killing themselves with over-production and vegetating in abstinence, the great problem of capitalist production is no longer to find producers and to multiply their powers but to discover consumers, to excite their appetites and create in them fictitious needs.

  Paul Lafargue

  Needs, Problem, Killing

  Paul Lafargue (1984). “Selected Marxist Writings of Paul Lafargue”

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• Love is madness, you can't put it in doses, it either surges over or under

  Ville Valo

  Love Is, Dose

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• Lust, that state commonly known as 'being in love,' is a kind of madness. It is a distortion of reality so remarkable that it should, by rights, enable most of us to understand the other forms of lunacy with the sympathy of fellow-sufferers. But, paradoxically, mad and suffering as one is, and the heat of the flame, few of us are glad as we feel that passion slip away No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all.

  Julian Fellowes

  Passion, Being In Love, Reality

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• I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.

  William Empson

  Views, Poetry, Literature

  William Empson (2000). “The complete poems”, Lane, Allen

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• He who without the Muse's madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen.

  Plato

  Art, Thinking, Doors

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• If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without ... let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine - for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish.

  Irving Kristol

  Wise, Lying, Believe

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• People can't live with themselves much longer. The planet cannot live with humans much longer! We have the weaponry, destruction of the planet, pollution, destruction of forests, countless manifestations of humans using their intelligence in the service of the dysfunction, the madness. It's a strange juxtaposition. Humans are intelligent, but if you look at history or even watch TV, they're also incredibly stupid.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Stupid, Intelligent, Dysfunction

  Source: www.ecomall.com

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• We are in the final stages of egoic madness. Almost the whole world is fighting each other. We witnessed the final stages of egoic madness in the 20th century, and even now it still is playing itself out. It has not quite come to an end yet.

  Eckhart Tolle

  Fighting, Finals, World

  Source: rayhemachandra.com

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• For the poets tell us, don't they, that the melodies they bring us are gathered from rills that run with honey, out of glens and gardens of the Muses, and they bring them as bees do honey, flying like the bees? And what they say is true, for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him. So long as he has this in his possession, no man is able to make poetry or to chant in prophecy.

  Plato

  Inspirational, Running, Men

  Plato (1963). “The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including The Letters”, Bollingen

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• We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon werage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago.

  Oscar Wilde

  Blood, Hands, White

  Oscar Wilde, Merlin Holland (2003). “Collins complete works of Oscar Wilde”, HarperCollins UK

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• An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion thatshowed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood.

  George Santayana

  Real, Successful, Men

  George Santayana (2015). “Character and Opinion in the United States”, p.40, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• The multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacity, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also with its madness and frenzy.

  Jean Baudrillard

  America, Important, Demand

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.91, Verso

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• The madness of love can always be suspended--to cook dinner or catch a plane, for instance.

  Mason Cooley

  Love, Dinner, Planes

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