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We are all born mad. Some remain so.
SAMUEL BECKETT, Waiting for Godot
- There is a pleasure sure,
- In being mad, which none but madmen know!
JOHN DRYDEN, The Spanish Friar
- Great wits are sure to madness near allied;
- And thin partitions do their bonds divide.
JOHN DRYDEN, Absalom and Achitophel
Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of the week.
WILLIAM DEMENT, Newsweek, Nov. 30, 1959
When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
MARK TWAIN, Mark Twain's Notebook
- There's a pleasure sure, in being mad,
- Which none but mad-men know.
GEORGE FARQUHAR, The Recruiting Officer
There are so many kinds of madness, so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is so. Yes. A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us--but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and we go insane.
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD, "The Case of Beauvais," Back to God's Country and Other Stories
We're all a little wacko sometimes, and if we think we're not, maybe we are more than we know.
MARIAH CAREY, Larry King Live, Dec. 19, 2002
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-Four
For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.
JEAN DEBUFFET, New Yorker, Jun 16, 1973
The sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Nominalist and Realist," Essays
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
- If we lose our sanity ...
- We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots,
- the howl of the utterly lost
- howling their nowhereness.
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence— whether much that is glorious— whether all that is profound— does not spring from disease of thought— from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
EDGAR ALLAN POE, "Eleonora"
I don't know what it is with the mad, but they've certainly got force of will. Maybe it's not having the checks and balances the rest of us have, or perhaps I'm kidding myself: maybe their minds are simply clearer, unclouded with the anxieties and morality that the rest of us are swaddled with. Perhaps they have the courage to point their magical thinking at the stars.
MICHAEL MARSHALL, The Upright Man
I have seen mad people, and I have known some who were quite intelligent, lucid, even clear-sighted in every concern of life, except on one point. They could speak clearly, readily, profoundly on everything; till their thoughts were caught in the breakers of their delusions and went to pieces there, were dispersed and swamped in that furious and terrible sea of fogs and squalls which is called MADNESS.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT, "The Horla"
Insanity is contagious.
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