Mania Quotes

• We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of others and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us.

  Thomas Merton

  Forgiveness, Hate, Compassion

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• I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and self contained; I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition; They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins; They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God; Not one is dissatisfied-not one is demented with the mania of owning things; Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago; Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth.

  Walt Whitman

  Lying, Dark, Animal

  "Song of Myself " l. 684 (written 1855)

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• The mania is like wasps under the skin, like my head's going to explode with ideas.

  Alice Weaver Flaherty

  Ideas, Skins, Wasps

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• Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.

  Louis Aragon

  Men, Errors, Ideas

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• The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Doubt, Literature

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• It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Science, Technology, Age

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• Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men.

  Christopher Morley

  Men, Self, Young

  Christopher Morley (2013). “The Haunted Bookshop”, p.14, Melville House

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• I am essentially an amateur medecin, and this to me is almost a mania.

  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

  Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (2012). “The Physiology of Taste: Or, Transcendental Gastronomy”, p.20, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.

  Wilfred Owen

  Reading, Fighting, Aunt

  Wilfred Owen (1998). “Selected Letters”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The mania started with insomnia and not eating and being driven, driven to find an apartment, driven to see everybody, driven to do New York, driven to never shut up.

  Patty Duke

  New York, Insomnia, Shut Up

  Patty Duke (2010). “Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic Depressive Illness”, p.13, Bantam

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• Ironically, tendency to ignore inconvenient facts and unwelcome evidence is actually President Reagan's true legacy, as I noted in 'The Nation' back in 2000, before the current right-wing mania for President Reagan gained its full force.

  Eric Alterman

  Wings, President, Facts

  "Think Again: Conservatives Prefer Reagan Fantasies to Reality (And So Did Reagan)" by Eric Alterman, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 5, 2012.

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• Old maids, having never bent their temper or their lives to other lives and other tempers, as woman's destiny requires, have for the most part a mania for making everything about them bend to them.

  Honore de Balzac

  Destiny, Maids, Bent

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• There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.

  Juan Gabriel

  Taken, Whim, Dangerous

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• The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Passion, Soul, Brain

  Hunter S. Thompson (2011). “Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the F”, p.351, Simon and Schuster

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• Mania starts off fun, not sleeping for days, keeping company with your brain, which has become a wonderful computer, showing 24 TV channels all about you. That goes horribly wrong after awhile.

  Carrie Fisher

  Depression, Fun, Sleep

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• I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious-by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but the solitary communion with the 'mountains & the woods'-the 'altars' of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a sort of mania for composition. Then I scribble all day, and read all night, so long as the disease endures.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Depression, Exercise, Night

  Edgar Allan Poe (2006). “The Portable Edgar Allan Poe”, p.488, Penguin

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• I was really inspired by this feeling of mania, a caricature of myself that I look down upon and see negatively.

  Caroline Polachek

  Feelings, Looks, Inspired

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• A lot of people come up to me expecting to meet the person they have seen perform. It's not going to happen, unless my mania, my stage person, responds to them and not the real me.

  Sia Furler

  Real, People, Expecting

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I'm still afflicted with the malady of research. I don't like what I do, and I paint it out, and paint it out again. I hope this mania will come to an end... I'm like a child at school. The white page must always be evenly written and slap! bang! and there's a blot! I'm still blotting and I'm forty years old.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir

  Children, School, Frustration

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• Any obsession is dangerous.

  Christina Ricci

  Actresses, Obsession, Obsessed

  "Hidden Depths". Interview with Gaby Wood, www.theguardian.com. March 27, 2004.

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  My recovery from manic depression has been an evolution, not a sudden miracle.

  Patty Duke

  Depression, Recovery, Swings

  Patty Duke (2010). “Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic Depressive Illness”, p.289, Bantam

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• With mania, is it dangerous to ride that euphoric feeling. You feel very animated and creative; I would fill journals with drawings. It feels good and you want it to last, but it can lead to being delusional. The delusions can be as real as you thinking you can fly.

  David LaChapelle

  Real, Thinking, Drawing

  "David LaChapelle’s ‘Still Life’: Celebrity Photographer On Bullying, Fame And Manic Depression". Interview with Priscilla Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 26, 2012.

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• I have spent my life going from mania to mania. Somehow it has all paid off.

  Ray Bradbury

  Paid Off, Paid

  "From the archive: Ray Bradbury on life, love and Buck Rogers". Interview with John Ezard, www.theguardian.com. June 7, 2012.

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• All the greatest men are maniacs. They are possessed by a mania which drives them forward towards thier goal. The great scientists, the philosophers, the religious leaders - all maniacs. What else but a blind singlenee of purpose could have given focus to thier genius, would have kept them in the groove of purpose. Mania... is as priceless as genius.

  Ian Fleming

  Religious, Men, Goal

  "Dr. No". Book by Ian Fleming, ch. 15: Pandora's Box, 1958.

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• One of the manifestations of depression for me is that I lose my will. And I thereby lose my ability to focus. I don't think I'll ever have the day-to-day consistency in my performance that something like This American Life has. If I'm not depressed and I'm on and I can focus and I can think through something hard and without interruption and without existential emptiness that comes from depression, that gives me - not mania. But I exalt. I exalt in not being depressed.

  Rachel Maddow

  Thinking, Giving, Focus

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