Quotes about Madness

We agreed to love each other madly.

A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman.

Today our world is mad in its obsession with pleasure, sex, and money. Its ear is too dull to hear the truth. Most men's eyes are blind. They do not want to see. They do not want to hear. They hurry to their doom.

If, then, Virgil says that the gods were such as these, and were conquered, and that when conquered they could not escape except under the protection of a man, what madness is it to suppose that Rome had been wisely entrusted to these guardians, and could not have been taken unless it had lost them! Indeed, to worship conquered gods as protectors and champions, what is this but to worship, not good divinities, but evil omens?

Nothing makes a man, or a body of men, as mad as the truth. If there is no truth in it, they laugh it off.

The religion of cheerfulness, as Father Brown reminds us, is a cruel religion, and maybe the best way not to go mad is not to mind too much if you do go mad."2

Whatever happens to me in life, I must believe that somewhere, In the mess or madness of it all, There is a sacred potential—

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.

Genius is full of trash.

To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

Best, therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.