quotations about madness
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
Batman: The Killing Joke
When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Madness & Civilization
Madness is an excited mind, indulging in the dreams of imagination, until the heated fancy makes chimeras appear real.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion, when the intuition of disaster is so painful that it almost provokes a greater madness.... One would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
EMIL CIORAN
On the Heights of Despair
In short, herein seems to lie the difference between idiots and madmen, that madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them: but idiots make very few or no propositions, and reason scarce at all.
JOHN LOCKE
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Go, madman! rush over the wildest Alps, that you may please children and be made the subject of declamation.
JUVENAL
Satires
Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.
R. D. LAING
"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964
In certain cases, a man blind from birth may have an operation performed which gives him his sight. The result: frequently misery, confusion, disorientation. The light that illumines the madman is an unearthly light, but I do not believe it is a projection, an emanation from his mundane ego. He is irradiated by a light that is more than he. It may burn him out.
R. D. LAING
"Transcendental Experience in Relation to Religion and Psychosis", The Psychedelic Review, 1964
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into still subtler form.
HERMAN MELVILLE
Moby Dick
We must first explore the identity of madness itself--who or what a madperson is thought to be--and how this seeming challenge to received notions of identity and reality can be re-inscribed and safely contained within the dominant culture. Put simply, this is accomplished by establishing madness as a condition of impairment, be it comic, tragic, or reprehensible, and thus by seeing it as something that can be cured. In this way the "real" person still exists: their socially constructed identity has been masked or damaged, but not irreparably lost. At the same time, we must ask how madness is intergral to the production of identity. How does the capacity for madness figure in the construction of a chivalric or amorous hero such as Lancelot or Tristan, for example? And how, in turn, do the mad contribute to the construction of communal identity? As we shall see, the madperson might be a scapegoat for a communal sense of sin or shortcoming, a sign of ineptitude or alterity from which community members can distance themselves, or even a kind of living metaphor for unspoken tensions that shape communal consciousness.
SYLVIA HUOT
introduction, Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost
Mental illness is a myth whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.
THOMAS STEPHEN SZASZ
The Untamed Tongue: A Dissenting Dictionary
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's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.
MARGARET ATWOOD
"Ophelis Has a Lot to Answer For"
The question of madness is intimately connected with the question of truth. The way in which Plato and Hegel "overcome" madness is based in turn on their conviction that madness is necessary. Madness is necessary as an access to the suprasensuous world, or to the next stage of dialectical thinking.
FERIT GUVEN
Madness and Death in Philosophy: Social Impacts of Sydney 2000
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
Doubt ... is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Memoirs of a Madman
Madness springs from hurt that goes deep, that ruptures our sense of self, leaving us helpless to shelter the person we are becoming. We lose a sense of agency over our own life and fall victim to how another defines us. Our thread of going on being is broken, and we live with this gap in our identity. Our sense of being alive feels intruded upon and disturbed; there is no rest for us anywhere.
ANN BELFORD ULANOV
Madness and Creativity
Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
NORMAN MAILER
An American Dream
Soon madness has worn you down. It's easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you're worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.
MARYA HORNBACHER
Madness: A Bipolar Life
Divine madness is not unique to Bengal, or even to India. It has been explored in various traditions: in both Eastern Orthodox and Western Christianity, among the Hasids of eastern Europe, among the Sufis, in possession and trance dancers around the world.
JUNE MCDANIEL
The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal