Sunday, February 12, 2017 – Our Current Madness
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
In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world. ~ John Forbes Nash, Jr.
The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one’s designs to one’s means. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
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
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
So long as man is protected by madness – he functions – and flourishes. ~ Emile M. Cioran
He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace. ~ Mikhail Lermontov
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane. ~ Henry Miller
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. ~ Milan Kundera
Money is our madness, our vast collective madness. ~ D. H. Lawrence
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
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
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
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
Sometimes the crowd is the madness – at others it’s the absence of the crowd that is. ~ Will Self
Sanity is madness put to good use. ~ George Santayana
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 baterrings 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
There is just so much hurt, disappointment, and oppression one can take… The line between reason and madness grows thinner. ~ Rosa Parks
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
Just Above Sunset 