MADNESS/MENTAL ILLNESS

MADNESS

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

~ Aristotle

I teach that all men are mad.

~Horace

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

~Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”


There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca, "On Tranquility of the Mind,"

Today I felt pass over me
A breath of wind from the wings of madness.

~ Charles Baudelaire

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

~Samuel Beckett

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.

~ Diogenes

Whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.

~proverb

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.

~Antonin Artaud

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

~ Mark Twain


Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.

~Baltasar Gracian


MENTAL ILLNESS

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.

~ Rita Mae Brown

Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.

~ Marcel Proust

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.

~Ludwig Wittgenstein


MENTAL DISORDER

He who considers disease results to be the disease itself, and expects to do away with these as diseases, is insane. It is an insanity in medicine, an insanity that has grown out of the milder forms of mental disorder in science, crazy whims.

~James Tyler Kent