Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Madness.
Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
Michel Foucault
I guess the definition of a lunatic is a man surrounded by them.
Ezra Pound
Madness is something rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.
Edward Dahlberg
No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
Aristotle
The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on the road to reason.
Hermann Broch
It's a question to ask ourselves if we're not mad. But who are the madmen, in God's name? Those who wonder about it, or the others? If we ever began to speak out loud, what would they do with us, tell me?
Victor Serge
But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!.
Jack Kerouac, On The Road, 1957
The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.
Salvador Dali
Perhaps he was a bit different from other people, but what really sympathetic person is not a little mad?
Isadora Duncan
O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper. I would not be mad.
William Shakespeare
We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!
George Bernard Shaw
Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
Dame Edith Sitwell
Much Madness is divinest Sense -- to a discerning Eye -- much Sense -- the starkest Madness --
Emily Dickinson
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
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
And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.
Antonin Artaud
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
First sign of madness, talking to your own head.
J.K. Rowling
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,Shakes so my single state of manThat function is smothered in surmise,And nothing is but what is not.
