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"No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness."

~Aristotle
(384—322 BCE)

"Love has reasons that reason knows not."

~St. Augustine

"There is less in this than meets the eye."

~Tallulah Bankhead

"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."

~Henri Bergson

"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true."

to a young physicist

"No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical."

~Niels Bohr
physicist

"The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain."

~Lord George Gordon Noel Byron
poet, playwright, & satirist (1788—1824)

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."

~Albert Camus

"The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears."

~John Vance Cheney
poet (1848—1922)

"Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing."

~Margaret Chittenden
writer

"The unthinkable has been made thinkable, and needs to be rendered unthinkable once more."

regarding the genocide in Afganistan

~Tien Chiu

"There is less harm to be suffered in being mad among mad men than in being sane all by one's self."

~Denis Diderot

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

~E.L. Doctorow

"A life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's own need to think."

~Adolf Eichmann

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts."

~Albert Einstein
physicist (1879—1955)

"Misery is almost always the result of thinking."

~Joseph Joubert

"They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me."

on being consigned to a mental institution, ca. 17th cen.

~Nathaniel Lee

"There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but

fair-featured and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears

a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she

is kind and very clean without
ostentation-

but she has
no imagination

And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl

or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers

and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs

but she is not kind."

"In Mind"

~Denise Levertov

"Those who danced were thought quite mad by those who could not hear the music."

~Angela Monet

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

~Michel de Montaigne
(1533—1592)

"Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."

~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
(1844—1900)

"All we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."

"My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so.
There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart — an
unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination
could torture into aught of the sublime.
For what really occurred, however, it is quite impossible that any human
being could have been prepared.
Be of heart, and fear nothing.
And I tried, but could not laugh with the Demon — and he cursed me
because I could not laugh.
TRUE! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been, and am; but
why will you say that I am mad?"

~Edgar Allen Poe

"Delusions on a small scale are psychosis, delusions on a grand scale are religion"

13 March 2000

~Lauren's Anthropology Professor

"I suffer dreams of a world gone mad. I like it that way and I know it."

"Leave"

~R.E.M.

"Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting."

~John Russel

"I'm one of those people who believe a clean desk is a sign of a sick mind."

~Barbara Schulte

"Aliquando et insanire iucundum est."
Tis sometimes pleasant even to act as a madman.

"Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit."
There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

"De Tranquillitate Animi"

~Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(ca. 4 BCE—65 CE)

"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."

"There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought? A vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

~Samuel Langhome Clemens aka Mark Twain
(1835—1910)

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."

~François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire
author & philosopher (1694—1778)

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."

~Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
poet, novelist, & playwright (1854—1900)

"Even now, there is a close association in my gut between feeling and pain. Logically, I recognize that feeling is, often is, pleasure and delight. Nevertheless, at an instinctual level, at a level outside of logic, feeling is pain."

"Gut Symmetries" (1997)

~Jeanette Winterson

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