Madness in Great Ones

Sunday, July 28, 2019 – Madness in Great Ones

Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world. ~ John Updike

In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world. ~ John Forbes Nash, Jr.

You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven. ~ Jimi Hendrix

America is beyond power; it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible. ~ John Updike

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. ~ Isaac Newton

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. ~ Edmund Burke

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable. ~ Voltaire

He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace. ~ Mikhail Lermontov

So long as man is protected by madness – he functions – and flourishes. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Howard Hughes was able to afford the luxury of madness, like a man who not only thinks he is Napoleon but hires an army to prove it. ~ Ted Morgan

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness. ~ D. H. Lawrence

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. ~ Milan Kundera

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely. ~ Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom. ~ J. G. Ballard

Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting. ~ John Russell

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide. ~ John Dryden

A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself. ~ Tom Stoppard

Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness. ~ Allen Ginsberg

The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one’s designs to one’s means. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it. ~ Robin Williams

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. ~ Graham Greene

Poetry led me by the hand out of madness. ~ Anne Sexton

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. ~ Christopher Morley

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. ~ Andre Gide

There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through. ~ Anaïs Nin

I walked into my own book, seeking peace. It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness. ~ Anaïs Nin

Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. ~ Virginia Woolf

When I sit down and write, I do it to relieve myself of the madness that burdens me so that new words can wrap me in newer, better, madness. ~ George Ivanovic

Sanity is madness put to good use. ~ George Santayana

Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night’s hallucinations and the non-being of light’s judgments. ~ Michel Foucault

What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance? ~ Theodore Roethke

There are those to whom one must advise madness. ~ Joseph Joubert

The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness. ~ Jean Cocteau

So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness. Madness is the emergency exit. ~ Alan Moore

There can be many reasons to travel, but wandering into the world for no particular reason is a sublime madness, which in all its whimsy and pointlessness may depict the story of life, and indeed could be a useful model to keep in mind, seeing as so much of life’s ambition comes unstuck or leads to nothing much at all. ~ Michael Leunig

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim. ~ Christopher Morley

Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off. ~ Rohinton Mistry

I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant – impossible socially, but full-scale – and that it’s the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banality. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness. ~ Anne Lamott

Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be. ~ Miguel de Cervantes

I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met. ~ Marguerite Duras

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. ~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Run mad as often as you choose but do not faint. ~ Jane Austen

There is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later. ~ Douglas Adams

Some may never live, but the crazy never die. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

‘Crazy’ is a term of art. ‘Insane’ is a term of law. Remember that, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

No doubt exists that all women are crazy; it’s only a question of degree. ~ W. C. Fields

Birth control makes women unattractive and crazy. ~ Steve Bannon

I would imagine that if you could understand Morse code, a tap dancer would drive you crazy. ~ Mitch Hedberg

Tolerance is you saying something crazy and me smiling and saying, ‘That’s nice.’ ~ Penn Jillette

Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live. ~ Charles Bukowski

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time. ~ Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet. ~ Philip K. Dick

Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how. ~ Philip K. Dick

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can’t go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family’s mental health. ~ Susanna Kaysen

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing. ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. ~ Margaret Chittenden

If there is a supreme being, he’s crazy. ~ Marlene Dietrich

It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone calls Him reasonable. ~ Peter Kreeft

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens. ~ Michel de Montaigne

America’s always been a great place to be crazy. It just used to be harder to make a living that way. ~ Charles P. Pierce

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us! ~ George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan