No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means.
Man disavows, and Deity disowns me: hell might afford my miseries a shelter; therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all bolted against me.
Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.
Insanity destroys reason, but not wit.
I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.
A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get into accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
You want to hear about insanity? I was found running naked through the jungles in Mexico. At the Mexico City airport, I decided I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing on takeoff. My body... my liver... okay, my brain... went.
I teach that all men are mad.
— Horace
I may be crazy but it keeps me from going insane.
Everyone is more or less mad on one point.
There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children.
I'm a nut, but not just a nut.
Insanity in individuals is something rare -- but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
For virtue's self may too much zeal be had; the worst of madmen is a saint run mad.
Whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.
— Proverb
Insanity is doing the same thing in the same way and expecting a different outcome.
All of us are crazy in one way or another.
What is madness but nobility of soul. At odds with circumstance?
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. [Hamlet]
Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.
When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.
How strange to have failed as a social creature -- even criminals do not fail that way -- they are the law's Loyal Opposition, so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.
Only the insane have strength enough to survive. Only the survivors determine what is sane.
There is no insanity so devastating in man's life as utter sanity.
You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.