94 Quotes On Madness And Sanity

In the intricate dance between madness and sanity lies a profound exploration of the human condition. Throughout history, writers, philosophers, and thinkers have contemplated the fine line that separates clarity from chaos, often finding wisdom in unexpected places. Our curated collection of 94 quotes offers a journey through these contemplations, inviting you to ponder the complexity of the mind. Whether you're seeking comfort in shared human experiences or looking to challenge your perceptions, these quotes provide a lens through which to view the delicate balance of sanity and madness. Dive in, and discover insights that resonate with your own journey.

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. “There nearly always is a method in madness.” - G.K. Chesterton

5. “First sign of madness, talking to your own head.” - J.K. Rowling

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

11. “The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.” - Philip K. Dick

12. “A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.” - Tom Stoppard

13. “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

14. “I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.” - Elizabeth Wurtzel

15. “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

16. “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

17. “All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.” - Roman Payne

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

19. “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

20. “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

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

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

23. “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

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

25. “When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.” - Marya Hornbacher

26. “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

27. “Proclamava-se ali o fim do mundo, a salvação penitencial, a visão do sétimo dia, o advento do anjo, a colisão cósmica, a extinção do sol, o espírito da tribo, a seiva da mandrágora, o unguento do tigre, a virtude do signo, a disciplina do vento, o perfume da lua, a reivindicação da treva, o poder do esconjuro, a marca do calcanhar, a crucificação da rosa, a pureza da linfa, o sangue do gato preto, a dormência da sombra, a revolta das marés, a lógica da antropofagia, a castração sem dor, a tatuagem divina, a cegueira voluntária, o pensamento convexo, o côncavo, o plano, o vertical, o inclinado, o concentrado, o disperso, o fugido, a ablação das cordas vocais, a morte da palavra.” - Saramago, José

28. “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

29. “Time and I have quarrelled. All hours are midnight now. I had a clock and a watch, but I destroyed them both. I could not bear the way they mocked me.” - Susanna Clarke

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

31. “Can one man's madness be another's real life?” - Emma Frances Dawson

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “He knew that Hop-Frog was not fond of wine; for it excited the poor cripple almost to madness; and madness is no comfortable feeling.” - Edgar Allan Poe

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

37. “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

38. “You don't seem mad at all,' she said.But I am, although I'm undergoing a cure, because my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. However, while I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being mad, living life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be. Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete?” - Paulo Coelho

39. “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

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

41. “Le fou ce ne sera plus l’exilé, celui qu’on repousse dans les marges de nos villes, mais celui qu’on rend étranger à lui même en le culpabilisant d’être celui qu’il est.” - Michel Foucault

42. “If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale” - John Kenneth Galbraith

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

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

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

46. “Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.-- from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius” - Author-Poet Aberjhani

47. “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

48. “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

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

50. “The paradox of innovation is that it is accepted as an innovation when it has become imitation.” - Piero Scaruffi

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

52. “Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?” - Jon Ronson

53. “Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.” - Criss Jami

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

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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” - Herman Melville

61. “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

62. “The perfect being, huh? There is no such thing as perfect in this world. That may sound cliché, but it’s the truth. The average person admires perfection and seeks to obtain it. But, what’s the point of achieving perfection? There is none. Nothing. Not a single thing. I loathe perfection! If something is perfect, then there is nothing left. There is no room for imagination. No place left for a person to gain additional knowledge or abilities. Do you know what that means? For scientists such as ourselves, perfection only brings despair. It is our job to create things more wonderful than anything before them, but never to obtain perfection. A scientist must be a person who finds ecstasy while suffering from that antimony. In short, the moment that foolishness left your mouth and reached my ears, you had already lost. Of course, that’s assuming you are a scientist” - Tite Kubo

63. “O God, I love you to the edge of madness, Venetia, but I'm not mad yet--not so mad that I don't know how disastrous it might be to you--to us both! You don't realize what an advantage I should be taking of your innocence!” - Georgette Heyer

64. “Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology.” - Clarice Lispector

65. “ONLY' having the Gift, people appreciate this madness as Art. Everybody wants to have Art in their lives, but no body wants to have what the Art came out from in their lives...” - Hiroko Sakai

66. “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

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

68. “It’s madness to see life as it is and not how it should be.” - Knight of the woeful countenance

69. “If there was one thing I feared as I was growing up . . . No, that's stupid. I feared hundreds of things: the dark, the death of my father, the possibility that I might rejoice the death of my mother, sums involving vernier calipers, groups of schoolboys with nothing much to do, death by drowning. But of all these, I feared the most the possibility that I might go mad too.” - Jerry Pinto

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

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

72. “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

73. “...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

74. “..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

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

76. “You`ll wondering why aren`t you born in Japan if you think you`re an Otaku” - Otaku Quotes

77. “... insanity is never reasonable.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

78. “Why should I laugh?' asked the old man. 'Madness in youth is true wisdom. Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it.” - Andrew Lang

79. “You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.” - Flannery O'Connor

80. “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

81. “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

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

83. “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

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

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

86. “Worse than madness. Sanity.” - William Golding

87. “I swam across the torrent of my madness, and pulled myself upon the shore of a new and better sanity.” - Frances Hardinge

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

89. “For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead---indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can’t sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed.” - Yoko Ogawa

90. “Dissociation is the common response of children to repetitive, overwhelming trauma and holds the untenable knowledge out of awareness. The losses and the emotions engendered by the assaults on soul and body cannot, however be held indefinitely. In the absence of effective restorative experiences, the reactions to trauma will find expression. As the child gets older, he will turn the rage in upon himself or act it out on others, else it all will turn into madness.” - Judith Spencer

91. “We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.” - William Golding

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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