What, without madness, is a man
More than a beast after feeding,
A corpse adjourned, the half-alive breeding?

Without madness what is man more than the healthy beast, corpse adjourned that procreates?

Let others take up my madness
And all that went with it.
Without madness what is man
But a healthy beast, A postponed corpse that breeds?

Mankind is a postponed corpse that breeds.

I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?

What is life? A madness
What is life? Illusion,
a shadow, a fiction,
and the greatest good means little;
for life is but a dream,
and the dreams, they too are dreams.

You are a spirit, then,
you Man, and not a Man
at all.
You are a spirit and you dwell
within the guts of mortal beast.

Tell us, pray, what devil
This melancholy is, which can transform
Men into monsters.

What an immature, self-destructive, antiquated mischief is man! How obscure and gross his prancing and chattering on his little stage of evolution! How loathsome and beyond words boring all the thoughts and self-approval of his biological by-product! this half-formed, ill-conditioned body! this erratic, maladjusted mechanism of his soul: on one side the harmonious instincts and balanced responses of the animal, on the other the inflexible purpose of the engine, and between them man, equally alien from the being of Nature and the doing of the machine, the vile becoming!

There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man.

For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

What is madness but nobility of the soul at odds with circumstance.

[T]here is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

What sweeter bliss and what more blessed state
Can be imagined than a loving heart,
But for the torment which Man suffers, that
Suspicion, sinister and deep, that smart,
That aching wretchedness, that malady,
That frenzied rage, which we call jealousy?