Madness Quotes - 6
More Madness Quotes
Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness on the brain. 226
Samuel Taylor Coleridge— 1816 'Christabel', pt.2.
It was a moment of madness for which I have subsequently paid a very, very heavy price.
— 1998 Talking about the episode on Clapham common which led to his resignation as Welsh Secretary. Television interview, 30 Oct.
'Tis thou, alone, who with thy mystic fan, Work'st more than Wisdom, Art, or Nature can, To rouse the sacred madness; and awake The frost-bound-blood, and spirits; and to make Them frantic with thy raptures, flashing through The soul, like lightning, and as active too.
Robert Herrick— 1648 'His Fare-well to Sack'.
Composing is not a profession. It is a maniaa harmless madness.
Arthur Honegger— 1951I Am a Composer.
Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction — it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.
brian aldiss— "In Conversation: Brian Aldiss & James Blish" in Cypher (October 1973); republished in The Tale That Wags the God (1987) by James Blish
The present mode of life on earth is madness, which is nontheless lethal for being legal. Rational existence is possible, but it calls for a world consciousness and a world design. People who develop the habit of thinking of themselves as world citizens are fulfilling the first requirement of sanity in our time.
Norman Cousins— Editorial (1971)
I have been guilty of watching Westerns without acknowledging that Native Americans have gone through the same madness as African Americans. Isn't it extraordinary that sometimes the most offended have not seen others being offended?
judith jamison— Dancing Spirit, ch. 3 (1993)
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
john le carré— "The United States of America Has Gone Mad" (2003)
Go! you may call it madness, folly;You shall not chase my gloom away!There 's such a charm in melancholyI would not if I could be gay.
samuel rogers— To ———, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
It is madness to attempt to hold. In the first place the troops cannot do it and in the second place if they do not retreat they will be destroyed. I repeat that this order be rescinded or that you find someone else.
gerd von rundstedt— November 30, 1941. Rundstedt sent this wire message that resulted in him being dismissed from office. Quoted in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany" - Page 861 - by William Lawrence Shirer - Germany - 1990
Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.
buckley, william f., jr.— P. J. O'Rourke, as quoted in Busted : Stone Cowboys, Narco-lords, and Washington's War on Drugs (2002) edited by Mike Gray
Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men." If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.
warren buffett— 2005 Chairman's Letter
The juniper-scented liquor had volatilized his thoughts; he should be thinking that madness caused this man to call himself a king, but was thinking rather that kingship had driven this man mad.
ursula k. le guin— Chapter 5 (City of Illusions (1967))
"Let us build such a church, that those who come after us shall take us for madmen," said the old canon of Seville, when the great cathedral was planned. Perhaps through every mind passes some such thought, when it first entertains the design of a great and seemingly impossible action, the end of which it dimly foresees. This divine madness enters more or less into all our noblest undertakings.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow— Here Longfellow is translating or paraphrasing an expression attributed to a canon of Seville, also quoted as "we shall have a church so great and of such a kind that those who see it built will think we were mad".
Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
edith sitwell— Ch. 15 (Heart and Mind)
Nature has no cure for this sort of madness, though I have known a legacy from a rich relative work wonders.
smith, f. e., 1st earl of birkenhead— On Bolshevism, in Law, Life, and Letters (1927), Vol. 2, Ch. 19.
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— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man’s dispute with madness was dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge
— Michel Foucault, in Murray Pomerance Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen, SUNY Press, 2004, p.302
When Fannius from his foe did fly Himself with his own hands he slew; Who e'er a greater madness knew? Life to destroy for fear to die.
— Martial, Epigrams (c. AD 86-103), Book II. 80. Same idea in Antiphanes—Fragment. Comicorum Græcorum, p. 567. Meineke's ed.
Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to Counsel It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
— Act III, sc. iii.
My death will not free you from this madness!
— Who: Alecto
— Note: After battling Kratos in the form of a kraken-like sea monster, she is slain by him plunging both his blades through her chest.
These are the gloomy comparisons of a disturbed imagination; the melancholy madness of poetry, without the inspiration.
junius— Letter No, VII. To Sir W. Draper
Love is a smoke rais'd with the fume of sighs; Being purg'd, a fire sparkling in a lover's eyes; Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears: What is it else? a madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
— Act I, scene 1, line 196.
Those who devour usury will not stand except as stand one whom the Evil one by his touch Hath driven to madness. That is because they say: "Trade is like usury," but Allah hath permitted trade and forbidden usury. Those who after receiving direction from their Lord, desist, shall be pardoned for the past; their case is for Allah (to judge); but those who repeat (The offence) are companions of the Fire: They will abide therein (for ever).
— Original: ?
?
?
?
?
— The Qur'an (?), Sura 2:275 (The Cow, ?), See also: Islamic banking.
O madness to think use of strongest wines And strongest drinks our chief support of health, When God with these forbidden made choice to rear His mighty champion, strong above compare, Whose drink was only from the liquid brook.
john milton— John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), line 553.
The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us,...The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being's difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, in Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything p.262
Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether.
— J. M. Coetzee, “Erasmus’s Praise of Folly: Rivalry and Madness,” Neophilologus 76 (1992), p. 1
Erections, Ejaculations,Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary madness.
Charles Bukowski— 1972 Title of book.
Much madness is divinest Sense To a discerning Eye Much Sensethe starkest madness
— c.1862 Complete Poems, no.435 (first published1890).
Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran, Pleasure with pain for leaven, Summer with flowers that fell, Remembrance fallen from heaven, And madness risen from hell, Strength without hands to smite, Love that endures for a breath; Night, the shadow of light, And Life, the shadow of death.
algernon charles swinburne— Second chorus, lines 1-12.
