Quotes about Madness

Concentrated populations of the deranged assume certain powers. It has an unsettling effect. You spend some time in a nuthouse and you'll see.

The point, Squire, is that where they used to be confined to State institutions or to the mudrooms and attics of remote country houses they are now abroad everywhere. The government pays them to travel. To procreate, for that matter. I've seen entire families here that can best be explained as hallucinations. Hordes of drooling dolts lurching through the streets. Their inane gibbering. And of course no folly so deranged or pernicious as to escape their advocacy.

And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal. Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness.

The salt, bitter passion of the sea, its indifference to the earth, its swinging, definite motion, its strength, its attack, and its salt burning, seemed to provoke her to a pitch of madness, tantalizing her with vast suggestions of fulfilment.

Oh! In what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! How ghastly the mere memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror. Out of the black cave of Time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin.

All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.  Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders.  He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation. 

The harmony of soul and body - how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void.

surely there is something in madness, even the demoniac, which Satan flees, aghast at his own handiwork, and which God looks on in pity..

Our brother Darl in a cage in Jackson where, his grimed hands lying light in the quiet interstices, looking out he foams.

With lack of sleep and too much understanding I grow a little crazy, I think, like all men at sea who live too close to each other and too close thereby to all that is monstrous under the sun and moon.

The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.

Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid.