142 Quotes About Madness

Madness—a concept that straddles the line between chaos and genius, often drawing a fine distinction between the unconventional thinker and the misunderstood outsider. Throughout history, madness has captivated the minds of artists, writers, philosophers, and even scientists, each offering a unique perspective on its complex nature. In the realm of literature and art, madness is celebrated as a potent source of inspiration and creativity; in the world of science and psychology, it is dissected and studied. This intriguing collection of quotes delves into the multifaceted nature of madness, exploring its fascinating allure, its profound depths, and its capacity to illuminate truths about the human experience. Join us as we journey through 142 thought-provoking quotes that shed light on the enigmatic dance between sanity and insanity.

1. “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” - Philip K. Dick

2. “Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!” - Dale Wasserman

3. “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

4. “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.” - Ronald D. Laing

5. “(Her husband's departure ...) had picked Mildred up by the hair and dropped her down at the doorstep of insanity.From "Butterfly on F street” - Edward P. Jones

6. “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” - Lewis Carroll

7. “Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.” - Montaigne

8. “Great wits are to madness near alliedAnd thin partitions do their bounds divide.” - John Dryden

9. “I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.” - Charles Bukowski

10. “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.” - Douglas Adams

11. “Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness? - The Joker” - Grant Morrison

12. “Madness is the acme of intelligence.” - Naguib Mahfouz

13. “I never think of policemen's wives; their beauty maddens me like wine.” - Kyril Bonfiglioli

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

15. “It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.” - James Connolly

16. “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed” - Thomas Moore

17. “If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse.And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humoured these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.” - Blaise Pascal

18. “Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation” - Julia Kristeva

19. “Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house” - William Gass

20. “All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.” - Yann Martel

21. “To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue. ” - Jennifer Salaiz

22. “Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.” - Gustave Flaubert

23. “...But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis—as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such. While the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls derive additional impulses from the influence of others, the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations are roused to arms. Thus the Turks repel their enemies, the Arabs of the Soudan break the British squares, and the rising on the Indian frontier spreads far and wide. In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace.” - Winston Churchill

24. “Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.” - Karen Joy Fowler

25. “Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.” - Ian McEwan

26. “I was in the situation of someone who has assumed, all his life, that madness was on eway, and suddenly in its grip, discovers that it is not only different from the way he'd imagined but that the person suffering from it is someone else, and that this someone else is not interested in finding out what madness is like: he is simply immersed in it, or it has descended on him, and that's that.” - Felisberto Hernandez

27. “Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

28. “True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.” - Edgar Allan Poe

29. “In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?” - Thomas Pynchon

30. “Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?” - Fernando Pessoa

31. “They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.” - Nathaniel Lee

32. “He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it... he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.” - Donald Barthelme

33. “Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.” - G.K. Chesterton

34. “One is always considered mad when one perfects something that others cannot grasp.” - Edward D. Wood, Jr.

35. “Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find the means frightening.” - Floriano Martins

36. “The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

37. “To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.” - Peter Straub

38. “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.” - Hermann Bahr

39. “It was such a heavenly dream: dreamed between the reality of war and the reality of hereditary madness.” - Jessie Douglas Kerruish

40. “Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness” - Erich Segal

41. “Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it.” - Ted Morgan

42. “I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.” - Kahlil Gibran

43. “Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.” - Philip K. Dick

44. “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

45. “Jack's doctors have told him he is crazy… but, the truth is, it's the Voices who are crazy, not him.” - Jennifer Daydreamer

46. “Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing.” - Penelope Fitzgerald

47. “If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us.--"The Content of the Psychoses” - Carl Gustav Jung

48. “To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.” - John Updike

49. “I have lived nearly fifty years, and I have seen life as it is. Pain, misery, hunger ... cruelty beyond belief. I have heard the singing from taverns and the moans from bundles of filth on the streets. I have been a soldier and seen my comrades fall in battle ... or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I have held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no gallant last words ... only their eyes filled with confusion, whimpering the question, "Why?"I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!” - Dale Wasserman

50. “Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.” - Andrew Sean Greer

51. “The most work he did on [the urinals] was to run a brush once or twice apiece, singing some song as loud as he could in time to the swishing brush; then he'd splash in some Clorox and he'd be through. ... And when the Big Nurse...came in to check McMurphy's cleaning assignment personally, she brought a little compact mirror and she held it under the rim of the bowls. She walked along shaking her head and saying, "Why, this is an outrage... an outrage..." at every bowl. McMurphy sidled right along beside her, winking down his nose and saying in answer, "No; that's a toilet bowl...a TOILET bowl.” - Ken Kesey

52. “Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

53. “Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.” - Rohinton Mistry

54. “Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana? Try to imagine this: You're a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it's directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep. And then one day, something inside you dies. Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone, possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That's hysteria siberiana.” - Haruki Murakami

55. “Erotic: meaning you're "desired."For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.” - Joyce Carol Oates

56. “I turned to Dionysus. "You cured him?""Madness is my specialty. It was quite simple.""But...you did something nice. Why?"He raised and eyebrow. "I am nice! I simple ooze niceness, Perry Johansson. Haven't you noticed?” - Rick Riordan

57. “Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever. They were not perfect, but they were my friends.” - Susanna Kaysen

58. “Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.” - Herman Melville

59. “All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.” - William Saroyan

60. “So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.” - Alan Moore

61. “I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.” - Benjamin Moser

62. “It's salt. Why don't you sprinkle some on me, honey? Aren't I just good enough to eat?” - Grant Morrison

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

64. “Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked. ” - Michael Gruber

65. “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, one by one.” - Charles Mackay

66. “Notre devoir n’est pas de nous débarrasser du fou, mais de débarrasser le fou de sa folie.” - Albert Londres

67. “Se o problema são os demónios estrangula-os com a tua loucura.If the problem is the demons strangle them with your madness.” - Victor Eustáquio

68. “He methodically basted the dark skin of the Alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs."One rule in life", he murmured to himself. "If you can smell garlic, everything is all right".” - J.G. Ballard

69. “I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.” - Charles Baudelaire

70. “You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.” - Megan Chance

71. “Azhrarn the Beautiful," said Chuz lovingly, "it is your beautiful madness I have come to see.” - Tanith Lee

72. “Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33)” - Tim Willocks

73. “No idea with who has no idea” - Nomoto

74. “Let me be mad, then, by all means! mad with the madness of Absinthe, the wildest, most luxurious madness in the world! Vive la folie! Vive l'amour! Vive l'animalisme! Vive le Diable!” - Marie Corelli

75. “Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

76. “This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.” - Rene Daumal

77. “You people would convict a grilled cheese sandwich of murder and the people wouldn’t question it.” - Charles Manson

78. “We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter” - Allen Ginsberg

79. “Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn't allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he'd have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what he'd really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again.” - David Foster Wallace

80. “Why,' I said, quite surprised by my own eloquence in inventing all this stuff, 'it happens every day. The old old story. Boys and girls fall in love, that is, they are driven mad and go blind and deaf and see each other not as human animals with comic noses and bandy legs and voices like frogs, but as angels so full of shining goodness that like hollow turnips with candles put into them, they seem miracles of beauty. And the next minute the candles shoot out sparks and burn their eyes. And they seem to each other like devils, full of spite and cruelty. And they will drive each other mad unless they have grown some imagination. Even enough to laugh.” - Joyce Cary

81. “The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a dayI would be grounded, rooted.Said my head would not keep flying awayto where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.You will find a good man soon.” The first psycho therapist told me to spendthree hours each day sitting in a dark closetwith my eyes closed and ears plugged.I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinkingabout how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happinesswhen they care more about what they givethan what they get. The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.” The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help meforget what the trauma said. The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cryabout the grief inside your bones.” But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumpedfrom the George Washington Bridgeinto the Hudson River convincedhe was entirely alone.” My bones said, “Write the poems.” - Andrea Gibson

82. “Unmoor the boat, we could go…downriver...History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods, ideas, personalities surface towards us and then sink away and some we hook out and others we ignore. And as the pattern changes so does the meaning. We cannot rely on the facts. Time that returns everything, changes everything. ..a bundle of abandoned clothes. The end of one identity and the beginning of another. …History is a madman's museum. I think I understand some of this, But it’s all subject to the tide. Unmoor the boat. Part miracle part madness. My life is a series of set sails and shipwrecks. I run aground I cut loose, the rim is dangerously near the waterline. I feel like a saint in a coracle. Head thrown back, sun on my throat. Unmoor the boat.” - Jeanette Winterson

83. “(there is) no other means of escaping from one's consciousness than to deny it, to look upon it as an organic disease of the terrestrial intelligence - a disease which we must endeavor to cure by an action which must appear to us an action of violent and willful madness, but which, on the other side of our appearances, is probably an action of health. ("Of Immortality")” - Maurice Maeterlinck

84. “I am aware that humans believe they are the sole owners of this curse, but all creatures love, Dieter. Love is our one shared madness, our one shared burden. All creatures are driven against sense by it, and even the lowest ant will die madly for her queen.” - B. Justin Shier

85. “And never, never, dear madam, put 'Wednesday' simply as the date! That way madness lies!” - Lewis Carroll

86. “Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever.” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

87. “Love that is not madness is not love.” - Pedro Calderón de la Barca

88. “Hé woffode ðá swá lange mid wordum dyslíce, óð ðæt hé feóll geswógen.” - Aelfric

89. “I guess in this culture of ever-shortening attention spans, it's good if a song can lift us out of the madness, even if only for a few minutes.” - Peter Bradley Adams

90. “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.” - G.K. Chesterton

91. “«…you’re too old not to have had, how shall I say, certain experiences. You’ve had bad internet dates. You’ve had people be creeps to you. You’ve seen what you’ve seen; you’ve felt what you’ve felt. Ideology is for people who don’t trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world» «I feel like I am going mad» «Madness is actually quite rare in individuals. It’s groups of people who go mad. Countries, cults ... religions»” - Douglas Coupland

92. “There are those to whom one must advise madness.” - Joseph Joubert

93. “...if in the heat of the dispute he insists and asks, 'Am I not the master of throwing myself out of the window?' I shall answer him, no; that whilst he preserves his reason there is no probability that the desire of proving his free agency, will become a motive sufficiently powerful to make him sacrifice his life to the attempt: if, notwithstanding this, to prove he is a free agent, he should actually precipitate himself from the window, it would not be a sufficient warranty to conclude he acted freely, but rather that it was the violence of his temperament which spurred him on to this folly. Madness is a state, that depends upon the heat of the blood, not upon the will. A fanatic or a hero, braves death as necessarily as a more phlegmatic man or a coward flies from it.” - Baron d'Holbach

94. “«¡No renuncies jamás a tus sueños, los cuerdos nada saben del sueño admirable de un loco!»” - Charles Baudelaire

95. “I walked into my own book, seeking peace.It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.” - Anais Nin

96. “Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” - Herman Melville

97. “When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes even genius; if you fail in the end, you remain a madman in the eyes of others, and maybe even yourself. When you are in the midst of the journey…there’s really no way of knowing which one you are.” (p.129)” - Hilary Austen

98. “Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?” - Alain De Botton

99. “Sir,' I interrupted him, 'you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady; you speak of her with hate --- with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel --- she cannot help being mad.” - Charlotte Brontë

100. “Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.” - Michel de Montaigne

101. “When a mad man found some certain way to express his insanity in original way, he would get promoted to be called an Artist.... Wait, are you talking about me?” - Hiroko Sakai

102. “People say 'I love Artists', but what they really know about Artists? They've ever thought about sharing the real madness with us? I believe those extreme passions/emotions in me separated from the real world is the sauce to pull out the inspirations out of me that touch the core of people's hearts, which is usually wandering about deep inside of you unconsciously covered with the social taboo called 'common sense'.” - Hiroko Sakai

103. “wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness” - Cassandra Clare

104. “Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.” - Paolo Bacigalupi

105. “I was, a near grown man, sat in his dank, dark and rickety digs, feverishly hovering about the glare of a computer screen like a disorientated moth, one searching for a flaming light of recognition from someone/anyone!” - Tom Conrad

106. “In his madness he became a terrifying actor!” - Luigi Pirandello

107. “You don’t appreciate the fact that madmen are very lucky.” - Luigi Pirandello

108. “precious laughing time is wasted, because I have to put up with Satan's stupid minions who smile without attempting to anger somebody else - leave us alone already.” - A Gentlemen

109. “Those with the money are eccentric. Those without, insane.” - Bruce Robinson

110. “Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.” - Luke Davies

111. “Everyone is more or less mad on one point.” - Rudyard Kipling

112. “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.” - Bram Stoker

113. “It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me” - Lynda Barry

114. “You don't understand, you fool' says Yegor, looking dreamily up at the sky. 'You've never understood what kind of person I am, nor will you in a million years... You just think I'm a mad person who has thrown his life away... Once the free spirit has taken hold of a man, there's no way of getting it out of him.” - Anton Chekhov

115. “In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.” - George Orwell

116. “...My point is, I went crazy. When I saw what a black, awful joke the world was. I went crazy as a coot! I admit it! Why can't you?” - Alan Moore

117. “..he was 'nuts about her', as the parlance of the day had it, as if it were generally recognised that love and madness are adjoining rooms with extremely porous walls.” - Jan Kjærstad

118. “Our love had begun in folly, and ended in madness!” - Charles Dickens

119. “Crazy people always think they're perfectly sane. It's what makes them so crazy; their entire delusion lies within the fact that they believe they aren't deluded.” - Nenia Campbell

120. “...then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.” - Herman Melville

121. “Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.” - C.G. Jung

122. “Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? - Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon” - David Grann

123. “Nūllum magnum ingenium sine mixtūrā dēmentiae fuitNo great talent without an element of madness” - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

124. “Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky.” - Lauren DeStefano

125. “Our existence comes with Death. And it comes with suffering, death alone is not enough and pleasure have consequences. wicked and fucked. love comes with hurting. And having means losing.” - Ira N. Barin

126. “I happen to be partial to humans - most, anyway. Clowns, not so much. Those evil bastards never stop smiling.” - Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

127. “Sabe, sargento, a loucura, quando dá a um grande número de pessoas, chama-se sociedade contemporânea. Quando dá a uma pessoa só, interna-se essa pessoa.” - Afonso Cruz

128. “Those who are truly enlightened, those whose souls are illuminated by love, have been able to overcome all of the inhibitions and preconceptions of their era. They have been able to sing, to laugh, and to pray out loud; they have danced and shared what Saint Paul called 'the madness of saintliness'. They have been joyful - because those who love conquer the world and have no fear of loss. True love is an act of total surrender.” - Paulo Coelho

129. “When he did think—when his brain began the slow chugging of rusty gears—the only thoughts that came were unspeakable things like, what’s the worst age a child can die? Worse yet was—after hours spent staring at the ceiling until it became a real-life Escher print with fans on the floor, useless windowsills, and dresser drawers that spilled underwear when opened—worse yet was when his mind found answers to those questions. Two-years-old isn’t so bad, he mused. They barely had a life. Twenty? At least they got to experience life! But fourteen... fourteen was the worst.” - Jake Vander Ark

130. “Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime, with a gift of tears;Grief, with a glass that ran;Pleasure, with pain for leaven;Summer, with flowers that fell;Remembrance, fallen from heaven,And madness risen from hell;Strength without hands to smite;Love that endures for a breath;Night, the shadow of light,And Life, the shadow of death.” - Algernon Charles Swinburne

131. “When people fall in love, they are apt to go a little mad.” - Jennifer Paynter

132. “Magda looks at me as if I've gone mad. Or I've grown up. It's kind of the same thing.” - Victoria Schwab

133. “It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people.” - Caitlín R. Kiernan

134. “Madness is only an amplification of what you already are.” - Margaret Atwood

135. “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?” - Tim Kreider

136. “Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.” - Neel Burton

137. “I took a few dragging steps toward the locker-room door. 'You're doing something to me that I wouldn't do to a dog,' I mumbled. 'What you're doing to me is worse than if you were to kill me. You're locking me up in shadows for the rest of my life. You're taking my mind away from me. You're condemning me slowly but surely to madness, to being without a mind. It won't happen right away, but sooner or later, in six months or in a year - Well, I guess that's that.'I fumbled my way out of the locker room and down the passageway outside, guiding myself with one arm along the wall, and past the sergeant's desk and down the steps, and then I was out in the street.("All At Once, No Alice")” - Cornell Woolrich

138. “An old dream with a shiny new veneer. It's fascinating, you know, how an obsolete madness is sometimes adopted and stylized in an attempt to ghoulishly preserve it. These are the days of second-hand fantasies and antiquated hysteria.("The Chymist")” - Thomas Ligotti

139. “At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.” - Aberjhani

140. “When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.” - Maurice Blanchot

141. “Ecoute les orguesElles jouent pour toiIl est terrible cet air làJ'espère que tu aimesC'est assez beau nonC'est le requiem pour un conJe l'ai composé spécialement pour toiA ta mémoire de scélératC'est un joli thèmeTu ne trouves pasSemblable à toi mêmePauvre conVoici les orguesQui remettent çaFaut qu't'apprennes par c�ur cet air làQue tu n'aies pas mêmeUne hésitationSur le requiem pour un conQuoi tu me regardesTu n'apprécies pasMais qu'est-ce qu'y a là dedansQui t'plaît pasPour moi c'est idemQue ça t'plaise ou nonJ'te l'rejoue quand mêmePauvre conEcoute les orguesElles jouent pour toiIl est terrible cet air làJ'espère que tu aimesC'est assez beau nonC'est le requiem pour un conJe l'ai composé spécialement pour toiA ta mémoire de scélératSur ta figure blêmeAux murs des prisonsJ'inscrirai moi-même : "Pauvre con” - Serge Gainsbourg

142. “It's amusing to me that we refer to people who live in their heads as detached, disturbed, or mad, when reality for anyone is actually a matter of the individual's state of mind. The mad truth—all people live in their heads. Whatever you think life is, it is.” - Richelle E. Goodrich