Quotes about madness

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

Driven raving mad by love—and he a man who had been always esteemed for his great prudence.

I think we're all a little mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better-and maybe not all that much better, after all.

I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times.

We're all not quite as sane as we pretend to be.

Who has not been, or is not to be mad in some lonely hour of life? Who is quite safe from the trembling of the balance?

The girl convinced herself that only the mad people in the world would tell you the truth when madness was the truth, when the truth itself was mad. (p64)

I had no doubt that there was madness here. How could it be otherwise in a cosmos that was ordered solely by will? It did not mean that the insane would automatically rise to the apex of the social order; their efforts would be diffused by the randomness of the impulses that drove them. But those whose extraordinary powers of will propelled them to the heights of power and rank would always be vulnerable to going further than they should. And there would be none but their equally mad rivals to restrain them.

The insane had a tendency to cloak others in the strange garments they found hanging in the backs of their own mental wardrobes. So, for that matter, did the rest of us, but the consequences of error were usually less drastic.

Insanity was not unknown among the wealthy. Indeed, some forms of madness had sometimes been cultivated as fashionable accessories.

Yes, he realized, if a man began to think of himself as divinely appointed, he was close to thinking of himself as God—and at that point lay insanity.

And that was it, he thought. It was all a series of rooms one never found one's way out of. You had to be content with that, or die, or go completely crazy.