Quotes on Madness :: Finest Quotes

Madness Quotes

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!

J. G. Ballard

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

Aristotle

A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.

Thomas Carlyle

Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

William Shakespeare

Great wits are sure to madness near allied - And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

John Dryden

For you to ask advice on the rules of love is no better than to ask advice on the rules of madness.

Terence

I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity?

William Saroyan

There's method in his madness.

William Shakespeare

There is no genius free from some tincture of madness.

Seneca

For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it is usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.

Margaret Eleanor Atwood

The true love is a state of half-madness, of some kind of soft obsession, ruling a so delicate kind of feeling that can lead a person from the greatest happiness to the most dreadful pain.

Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto

However, there are all sorts of behaviours in the Bible that might be called mad now, but aren't designated as insanity by the text itself. People see visions of angels going up and down ladders, of fiery chariots and, like Moses, who hears a bush talking, and Balaam the prophet who has a conversation with his donkey, they hear voices of those who cannot be said to be present in any usual sense of the word. They also speak in tongues, as the disciples do at Pentecost. Like madness, the visions, the voices and the speaking in tongues are due to external and usually divine agencies. In a world so permeated with supernatural powers, there are no accidents, and in one so riddled with prophets who went into a frenzy while prophesying many more kinds of behaviour were accepted as normal, at least for a prophet or an inspired person, than would be the case now. John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins and wandering around in the wilderness denouncing his social superiors, was not thought of as a de-institutionalized street person who's gone off his medications, but as a saint. And this was the pattern for mediaeval views of aberrant behaviour if you were acting crazy it was a divine punishment, or else you were possessed, by powers either divine or demonic perhaps aided, in the latter case, by witches.

Margaret Eleanor Atwood

Whatever a poet writes with enthusiasm and a divine inspiration is very fine. Earliest reference to the madness or divine inspiration of poets.

Democritus

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

Horace

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Edmund Burke

It is unmistakable madness to live in poverty only to die rich.

Juvenal

There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness.

Sam Peckinpah

Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness.

Seneca

Like madness is the glory of this life As this pomp shows to a little oil and root.

William Shakespeare

Love that is not madness is not love.

Pedro Calderon

There is nothing so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it in expecting evil before it arrives?

Marcus Annaeus Seneca

We seem bent upon saving the Vietnamese from Ho Chi Minh, even if we have to kill them and demolish their country to do it....I do not intend to remain silent in the face of what I regard as a policy of madness which, sooner or later, will envelop my son and American youth by the millions for years to come.

Walt W. Rostow

A woman in taffeta is seen lighting candles for a formal dinner for two. She sits down at the table, lifts a wine glass and toasts an imaginary guest. Dining alone, in style, is used as a metaphor for loneliness and even madness.

Georgia Dullea

It is a madness to make fortune the mistress of events, because in herself she is nothing, but is ruled by prudence.

John Dryden

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, dont blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Louis de Bernieres

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