I closed my eyes, adding dark to dark, and the wanting unfurled like the sails of a phantom ship. This could be my universe. This nowhere world, circumscribed by skin and breath, where nothing mattered...

Why should I laugh?’ asked the old man. ‘Madness in youth is true wisdom. Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you...

wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

Those teetering on madness hold keys to doors you know nothing about. You must ask yourself if these rooms are worth visiting—if in the end life would have made more sense having been in them.

… your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me…

I studied him and realized that madness is the last defence of the mind when it can’t hope to reconcile itself with events; I too was standing between routine and the unknowable.

Some are born mad, some achieve madness, and some have madness thrust upon ’em.

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...

Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?

To stay sane in a mad world is the real victory.

Every drunk his own madness.

And how do you know that you’re mad? “To begin with,” said the Cat, “a dog’s not mad. You grant that?” I suppose so, said Alice. “Well then,” the Cat went on, “you see a...

I sometimes think if I did not write I would be a madwoman. Now I am a sane woman with a lot of mad pages.

Non-semnificaţia iubirilor mele & nonşalanţa cu care au fost ele aruncate la gunoi mi-au ciop rţit în primul r nd sufletul, mi-au provocat acea stupefacţie care mi-a umplut nebunia cu vitriol.

Cuando el amor no es locura,no es amor.

He was walking around in circles, the smell of the old furniture suddenly very distinct. There was a newspaper in his hand and he started reading it, paying particular attention to the headlines which seemed...

This must never happen again. It’s complete madness.

Why does our world feel so very crazy? Why do mental and emotional illnesses emerge more rapidly than we can educate psychiatrists, psychologists, addiction specialists, and mental health counselors to diagnose and treat them? We...

All men are mad in some way or another, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God’s madmen too, the rest of the world.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,” for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been...

Somewhere, beyond blackness, some tyrant host swaps breathing for airlessness to test me. I had no concept of myself, no link to the things I knew. It is hard to explain the lack of anything...

Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation,...

When your efforts run in the face of conventional wisdom and accepted mastery, persistence can look like madness. If you succeed in the end, this extreme originality reformulates into a new level of mastery, sometimes...

Qui cache son fou, meurt sans voix

All habits are bad habits. (…) Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

Some say that you should turn your face from the light of the moon. They say it makes you mad.I turn my face towards it and I laugh.Make me mad, I whisper. Go on, make...

That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad.” This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy’s hidden life.

Proclamava-se ali o fim do mundo, a salvação penitencial, a visão do sétimo dia, o advento do anjo, a colisão cósmica, a extinção do sol, o espírito da tribo, a seiva da mandrágora, o unguento...

Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s...

Se tudo o resto não me basta por que hei-de impedir o efeito paliativo das benzodiazepinas e a volúpia desta evocação alucinatória?If everything else is not enough for me why should I stop the palliative...

Worse than madness. Sanity.

But at some point it becomes obvious that, ultimately, the adventure of faith is the most sensible thing to do, and in fact the only thing worth doing. As Sam says toward the end of...

What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them

I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins, eyes and ears full of marijuana, eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the...

A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves

I used to love lulling, running water – a sound so infrequent in cityscapes. Its loss always made me feel lonely when I lived amongst concrete.

He methodically basted the dark skin of the Alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs.”One rule in life”, he murmured to himself. “If you can smell garlic, everything is all right”.

When a mad man found some certain way to express his insanity in original way, he would get promoted to be called an Artist…. Wait, are you talking about me?

La diferencia entre el “normal” y el “loco” es de grado, no de forma.

With every vial of success there is always a pinch of madness.

During the earliest attacks of Fear and intense unreality, I sometimes uttered these unconscious and shocking words: ‘I should prefer to escape into madness to avoid this consuming fear.’ Alas, I did not know what...

In college, educated women (I found out) were frigid; active women (I knew) were neurotic; women (we all knew) were timid, incapable, dependent, nurturing, passive, intuitive, emotional, unintelligent, obedient, and beautiful. You can always get...

It is easy to identify a shallow person by the attention he gives to what will do him absolutely no good.

she will change the world someday, her cure of love in a world gone mad; is the gentle kind of touch that will teach women to grow and men to rise.

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

They ask me what is madness and I reply it is a gift.They ask me why, and I said:The world trough the eyes of normal people is boring, but look at it trough the eyes...

Often it feels like I am breathing today only because a few years back I had no idea which nerve to cut…

I had lost confidence and a sense of self. Who am I? Am I a person who cowers in fear at the back of a spin class, avoiding everyone’s gaze? This uncertainty about who I...