“Sono guarito, signori: perché so perfettamente di fare il pazzo, qua; e lo faccio, quieto! - Il guajo è per voi che la vivete agitatamente, senza saperla e senza vederla la vostra pazzia.”
Source: Enrico IV - Diana e la Tuda
“I’m not the law. I’m not vigilante justice. I’m not vengeance personified. I don’t really know what I am, or why.
In moments like these, however, I can’t restrain myself from action. A kind of madness comes over me, and I can no more turn away from what must be done than I can wish this fallen world back into a state of grace.”
Source: Odd Thomas
“Transmuting knowledge into narrative is an alchemical process. It demands clarity of thought, precision of language, creativity, and a touch of madness.”
“This is the "only a madman" argument.
Whenever I hear it (and it's often trotted out in such debates), I remind myself that madmen really exist. Sometimes they achieve the highest levels of political power in modern industrial nations.”
Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
“War is insanity magnified,
feeding off toxic madness
which then excretes chaos
completely indifferent
to the slaughtered rhymes and
screaming reasons of human beings.”
Source: Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays
“I sit on the precipice of my creative sensibilities staring over and out into a wide expanse of sparkling madness and sometimes envy those who simply fall into it and let everything else go. I suppose that’s what writing poetry is for.”
Source: Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays
“The opposite of misery is also misery because there is no escaping the madness of this world.”
“Ultimately, confinement did seek to suppress madness, to eliminate from the social order a figure which did not find its place within it; the essence of confinement was not the exorcism of a danger. Confinement merely manifested what madness, in its essence, was: a manifestation of non-being; and by providing this manifestation, confinement thereby suppressed it, since it restored it to its truth as nothingness. Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing.”
Source: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
“How can you tell who are the clever men and who are the madmen in this world, where reason and folly, madness and genius are often confused.”
Source: Tales Of Supernatural Terror
“I am relatively certain that religious faith alone doesn't prevent hallucinations because many patients try to save themselves by their faith. Observation would suggest useful social acts (charity) would come closer to preventing schizophrenia.”
Source: The Presence of Spirits in Madness