158 Quotes Tagged: madness

Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.

This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.

It's salt. Why don't you sprinkle some on me, honey? Aren't I just good enough to eat?

If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse.

And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humoured these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.

Don't feel better than anybody, because you feel like something. Always have it at the back of your mind that you were nothing before you became something, and that thing you supposed to be is absolutely nothing.

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

Perchance, dear reader, you will then believe that nothing is stranger and madder than actual life, and that this is all that the poet can conceive, as it were in the dull reflection of a dimly polished mirror.

Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.

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.

To drive free, to love free, to court destruction with taunts. One brief house of madness and joy!

Great wits are to madness near allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

"Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden," Jacques said. And then: "I wonder why."
...
Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road — and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright — and it's true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.
... Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another type of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of the pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.