Madhouses Quotes:

Dear Lord, what a madhouse the world is!

- Leo Tolstoy

source: LEO TOLSTOY (1961). “ANNA KARENINA”

topic: Dear Lord, World, Madhouses

Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse.

- Jack Kerouac

source: Jack Kerouac, Ann Charters (1995). “Jack Kerouac: selected letters, 1940-1956”, Viking Pr

topic: Madhouses

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

topic: Crazy, Insanity, Personality, Insanity And Sanity, Madhouses

Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!

- Friedrich Nietzsche

source: Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo”, p.93, Vintage

topic: Depression, Long, Earth, Madhouses

The world is, for the most part, a collective madhouse, and practically everyone, however "normal" his facade, is faking sanity.

- John Astin

topic: World, Normal, Mental Illness, Facade, Madhouses

The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.

- Allen Ginsberg

source: Allen Ginsberg, Lewis Hyde (1984). “On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg”, p.391, University of Michigan Press

topic: Depression, Soul, Mental Illness, Madhouses

Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful.

- Samuel Beckett

topic: Taken, Eye, Simple, Figments, Precaution

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

- Anna Freud

topic: Firsts, Shock, Madhouses

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.

- Georg C. Lichtenberg

topic: Wall, Might, Inmates, Madhouses

But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

source: "Alarms and Discursions". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1910.

topic: Nice, People, Progress, Madhouses

The world is so full of simpletons and madmen, that one need not seek them in a madhouse.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

source: Conversations with Goethe Johann Peter Eckermann 17 March (1830).

topic: Stupidity, Needs, World, Simpletons, Madhouses

The whole of life has become an institution, a madhouse in which duties are to be fulfilled not love; in which you have to behave, not be spontaneous; in which a pattern has to be followed, not the overflow of life and energy. That's why the mind thinks and decides everything, because there is danger.

- Rajneesh

topic: Life, Thinking, Mind, Be Spontaneous, Madhouses

If you live with unhealthy people, to be healthy is dangerous. If you live with insane people, then to be sane is dangerous. If you live in a madhouse, even if you are not mad at least pretend that you are mad; otherwise those mad people will kill you.

- Rajneesh

topic: People, Mad, Healthy, Madhouses

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 humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.

- Blaise Pascal

topic: Kings, Plato, Order, Plato And Aristotle, Madhouses

I run blindly through the madhouse ... And I cannot even pray ... For I have no God.

- Grant Morrison

topic: Running, Praying, Madhouses

Have you ever thought that war is a madhouse and that everyone in the war is a patient?

- Oriana Fallaci

topic: Peace, War, Patient, Madhouses

Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.

- Charles Bukowski

source: Charles Bukowski (2009). “Hollywood”, p.89, Canongate Books

topic: Madhouses

I refuse to be. In the madhouse of the inhuman I refuse to live. With the wolves of the market place I refuse to howl ...

- Marina Tsvetaeva

source: Marina Tsvetaeva (2011). “Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems”, p.159, Carcanet

topic: Nazism, Rebellion, Howl, Madhouses

I have a theory that Southern madhouses are full of gifted women who were stifled.

- Anne Rivers Siddons

topic: Southern, Theory, Gifted, Madhouses

City is a madhouse! Don't stay there too much or you get mad! Go to the nature, to the Temple of the Clever!

- Mehmet Murat Ildan

topic: Nature, Clever, Cities, Madhouses

Somewhere in this process you will come face-to-face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way and you just never noticed. You are also no crazier than everybody else around you. The only real difference is that you have confronted the situation they have not.

- Henepola Gunaratana

topic: Crazy, Real, Differences, Madhouses

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.

- Ernest Becker

source: Ernest Becker (1997). “The Denial of Death”, p.172, Simon and Schuster

topic: Creativity, Detours, Ends, Madhouses

...There is a school of thought, a heresy from the madhouse of heresies in the ninth century, that says God is good and is in control of every individual thing that happens, every event, but that unfortunately the devil is in control of the timing.

- Norman Rush

source: Norman Rush (2013). “Mating”, p.193, Granta Books

topic: School, Devil, Events, Madhouses

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

source: Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.86, Penguin

topic: Shepherds, Different, Want, Madhouses

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.

- Robert Musil

topic: Lying, Taken, Decay, Madhouses

The world is a collective madhouse, its inhabitants are merely faking sanity. It is critical to becoming aware of these aberrations, for pretensions can be the enemy of love.

- John Astin

topic: Enemy, Aberration, World, Pretension, Madhouses

[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.

- Kate Millett

topic: Jail, Mind, Steps, Social Control, Detention

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.

- Anton Chekhov

topic: Escaping, Useless, Prison, Madhouses

Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.

- Oliver Heaviside

source: Electromagnetic Theory Chapter I, Introduction (p. 12)

topic: Knowledge, Essence, Facts, Madhouses

Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

topic: Life, Math, Looks, Madhouses

When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much.

- John Cleese

source: "The Secret Life of Brian". TV Movie, January 1, 2007.

topic: People, Age, World, Madhouses

Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last

- Gregory Maguire

topic: Small Steps, Lasts, Steps, Madhouses

As we go on with our lives we tend to forget that the jails and the hospitals and the madhouses and the graveyards are packed.

- Charles Bukowski

topic: Madhouses

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about.

- Michael Ende

topic: Children, Doors, Numbers, Brothels, Kipling

Madhouses are houses made on purpose to cause suffering . . . I cannot stand any longer the screams of these creatures.

- Camille Claudel

topic: House, Suffering, Purpose, Madhouses

At the moment, every country arrives at climate negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible. This is the logic of the madhouse, a recipe for collective suicide. We dont want a global suicide pact. We want a global survival pact

- Mohamed Nasheed

topic: Suicide, Country, Survival, Emissions, Madhouses

Society is a madhouse whose wardens are the officials and the police.

- August Strindberg

topic: Police, Society, Wardens, Madhouses

Dark City Blue is a freight train of a thriller crashing through some madhouse city night while a bomb's ticking down to zero. It's the cage fighting equivalent of a police procedural: violent, gaudy, and packing heat.

- Trent Jamieson

topic: Zero, Fighting, Dark, Packing, Dark City

When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.

- Thomas Szasz

topic: Jesus, Men, People, Locked, Madhouses

Performers always come back from the Edinburgh festival with adventure stories. Watts told a few: meeting a young kilt maker who spent a year in a madhouse after eating too much LSD, and accompanying Seattle actor and musician Michael McQuilken (of Collaborator Productions) to the hospital after a Frisbee accident. He reached up to catch it and cut his hand on a sign, .. He had to get a few stitches, but I think he can still play.

- Reggie Watts

topic: Adventure, Cutting, Thinking, Kilts, Frisbee

It's not the large things that send a man to the madhouse... no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies... not the death of his love but the shoelace that snaps with no time left.

- Charles Bukowski

topic: Men, Tragedy, His Love, Large Things, Shoelaces

...America didn't have to fight scarcity and we all felt guilty before people who still had to struggle for bread and freedom in the old way ... We weren't starving, we weren't bugged by the police, locked up in madhouses for our ideas, arrested, deported, slave laborers sent to die in concentration camps. We were spared the holocausts and nights of terror. With our advantages we should be formulating the new basic questions for mankind. But instead we sleep. Just sleep and sleep, and eat and play and fuss and sleep again.

- Saul Bellow

topic: Struggle, Sleep, Fighting, Madhouses

The worst men have the best jobs the best men have the worst jobs or are unemployed or locked in madhouses.

- Charles Bukowski

topic: Jobs, Men, Unemployed, Madhouses

I sit here drunk now. I am a series of small victories and large defeats and I am as amazed as any other that I have gotten from there to here without committing murder or being murdered; without having ended up in the madhouse. as I drink alone again tonight my soul despite all the past agony thanks all the gods who were not there for me then.

- Charles Bukowski

topic: Small Victories, Madhouses

We are Born like this Into this Into these carefully mad wars Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness Into bars where people no longer speak to each other Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings Born into this Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

- Charles Bukowski

source: Charles Bukowski (2012). “The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected Poems 1951-1993”, p.475, Canongate Books

topic: Madhouses

England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.

- Leon Trotsky

topic: Lasts, England, Revolutionary, Madhouses

alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills.

- Charles Bukowski

source: Charles Bukowski, “Alone With Everybody”

topic: Junkyard, Madhouses

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

topic: Keys, Bangs, Enough, Madhouses

The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited.

- Charles Bukowski

topic: Jobs, Men, Talking, Madhouses

And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)

- Jack Kerouac

topic: Garden, Thinking, Nuts, Madhouses