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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Insanity

Every madman thinks all other men mad.

Syrus.

Fetter strong madness in a silken thread.

Shakespeare.

Insanity is not a distinct and separate empire; our ordinary life borders upon it, and we cross the frontier in some part of our nature.

Taine.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.

Shakespeare.

  • I am not mad; I would to heaven I were!
  • For then, ’tis like I should forget myself.
  • Shakespeare.

  • There is a pleasure, sure,
  • In being mad, which none but madmen know!
  • Dryden.

  • For those whom God to ruin has designed
  • He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind.
  • Dryden.

    No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

    Aristotle.

    Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

    Dryden.

    He appears mad indeed but to a few, because the majority is infected with the same disease.

    Horace.

    Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.

    Burke.

    All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity.

    Johnson.

    With curious art the brain, too finely wrought, preys on itself, and is destroyed by thought.

    Churchill.

    The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye.

    Emerson.

  • We are not ourselves
  • When nature, being oppress’d, commands the mind
  • To suffer with the body.
  • Shakespeare.

  • Much madness is divinest sense
  • To a discerning eye;
  • Much sense the starkest madness,
  • ’Tis the majority
  • In this, as all, prevails.
  • Assent, and you are sane;
  • Demur,—you’re straightway dangerous,
  • And handled with a chain.
  • Emily Dickinson.

    Ever as before does madness remain, terrific, altogether infernal, boiling up of the nether chaotic deep, through this fair tainted vision of creation, which swims thereon, and which we name the real.

    Carlyle.

    If the raving be not directed to a single object it is mania, properly so called; if to one object, it constitutes monomania.

    R. Dunglison.