c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Repetition is the mother of perfection.
— Ryan Straten
You know how when you step on court your coach is like "go go go!"? And all throughout you just keep telling yourself to hit harder and harder and keep at it? You know how much you treasure those five-minute timeouts? You know how good you feel at the end of a session? You know how you're glad you're tired? No pills, no shots, just plain energy. I want to work like that. Whether I have to write ten thousand words or send five hundred emails, brainstorm for hours at a time, I want to have that energy. To keep fighting. To know it's all worth it. Oh, yeah. That's my perfect day.
— Thisuri Wanniarachchi
Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels.
— Randall Jarrell, No Other Book: Selected Essays
I wanted to reject it all because I was sick of being perfect. I was so bored with normality and dreams of poster boys and tabloid covers.
— J. Merridew, Teenage Idol
Perfection is real. It occurs when you find that other part of you, that other person, that when combined you become one, perfect being.
— Shannan Jacoby
Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from the other rooms into a state of vague ecstasy, while he contemplated the small sheet of water outside the window. It was that happy frame of mind into which his people could project themselves so easily - the mere absence of immediate unpleasant preoccupation could start it off, and a landscape which included the sea, a river, a fountain, or anything that occupied the eye without engaging the mind, was of use in sustaining it. It was the world behind the world, where reflection precludes the necessity for action, and the calm which all things seek in death appears briefly in the guise of contentment, the spirit at last persuaded that the still waters of perfection are reachable.
— Paul Bowles, The Spider's House
I don't buy junk. When I buy something, it's got to be perfection or I don't want it. You won't find me coming home with five cheap suits, one for each day of the week. I'd rather have one perfect suit or none.
— Nancy Horan, Loving Frank
Perfection's a myth, the latter was only meant to define it.
— Sachin Kumar Puli
Switching off perfection switched on the human quality
— Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
Why would anyone want perfection when growth comes from flaws?
— Shannon L. Alder
There's no room in perfection for insecurity.
— R.K. Lilley, Mile High
True perfection has to be imperfect. I know that sounds foolish, but it's true.
— Noel Gallagher
Don't worry about getting perfect, just keep getting better.
— Frank E. Peretti, Illusion
You are a beloved child of God. But please remember this, too: You are human. You cannot expect to eat perfectly, look perfect, or be perfect. When you stumble, pick yourself up, even if you have to do it again and again.
— Kate Wicker, Weightless: Making Peace with Your Body
Within these strangely specific conditions, everything is perfect. We are perfect.
— Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story
You are the most ludicrous excuse for a man I've ever known - but there isn't a centimetre of you that I don't think is perfect.
— Lucy Robinson, The Greatest Love Story of All Time
The only skill that cannot be perfected is perfection itself.
— Daphne Delacroix
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but love is the perfection of it".'Perfection
— Steve Copland
If I invite God into my life, I am and always will be good enough.
— Kate Wicker, Weightless: Making Peace with Your Body
In the depth of our heart, we already know that we are perfect as we are. In the depth of our inner being, we already know that life is perfect as it is.
— Swami Dhyan Giten, The Silent Whisperings of the Heart - An Introduction to Giten's Approach to Life
One aspect of perfection, after all, it stands to reason, will be that our need for imperfection will cease. Or, perhaps more precisely: that imperfection itself will cease to have meaning.
— Ron Currie Jr., Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles
You can't make the world perfect, Daniel," Michelle said calmly while dusting dirt off her jeans with her delicate hand. "No. I can't," I agreed. "But I can sure help make it better.
— Shannon A. Thompson, November Snow
Everyone has their own varying means of measuring thing. Sometimes people can agree on something, but other times they can't.
— ichtys, Superior Cross #5
Oftentimes people expect Christians to be perfect but the reality is...Spiritual perfection is imperfection! God then does His best work.
— Sanjo Jendayi
When did creating a flawless facade become a more vital goal than learning to love the person who lives inside your skin?
— Ellen Hopkins, Perfect
Organization isn't about perfection; it's about efficiency, reducing stress and clutter, saving time and money and improving your overall quality of life.
— Christina Scalise, Organize Your Life and More
...when you're broken, everything gets a little honester - you make mistakes and don't give a damn - you give up on perfection, but get real...
— John Geddes
Perfection: a collection of a variety of pieces that, when viewed and felt individually, are difficult and confusing; but when brought together as one, create a perfect picture. Symphony, harmony, serenity.
— C. JoyBell C.
Don't wait for the right answer and the golden path to present themselves.This is precisely why you're stuck. Starting without seeing the end is difficult, so we often wait until we see the end, scanning relentlessly for the right way, the best way and the perfect way.The way to get unstuck is to start down the wrong path, right now.Step by step, page by page, interaction by interaction. As you start moving, you can't help but improve, can't help but incrementally find yourself getting back toward your north star.You might not end up with perfect, but it's significantly more valuable than being stuck.Don't just start. Continue. Ship. Repeat.
— Seth Godin
The night seemed suddenly defiled by the absence of music, as if the silence itself was injecting a sickness that only another song could cure.
— Jake Vander-Ark, The Accidental Siren
If it looks a bit rough, a little worn, with little splotches - those have the swetest flavor. The ones that are perfect on the outside tend to be a bit more bland. That is true about many things in life.
— Jeff Wheeler, The Wretched of Muirwood
It's hard to do," I said. Wes looked at me. "What is?" I swallowed, not sure why I'd said this out loud. "Get it right.
— Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever
Judge that boy if you must; for debauchery, for objectifying innocence... but before you finalize your verdict, oh innocent reader, I beg you to scan again that last stanza. What you and I overlooked in our cloud of perversion and nasty objectification was the unrestrained joy of a little girl playing dress-up for the very first time.
— Jake Vander-Ark, The Accidental Siren
Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...
— Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
Evangelicals sometimes expect too much or, to put it more precisely, we look for a kind of change God hasn't promised. It's possible to expect too little, but under-expectation is usually a cynical reaction to dashed hopes for too much. We manage to interpret biblical teaching to support our longing for perfection. As a result, we measure our progress by standards we will never meet until heaven.
— Larry Crabb, Inside Out: Real Change Is Possible If You're Willing to Start from The...
Every time I think about that girl, my mind commits a sin.
— Jake Vander-Ark, The Accidental Siren
In this temporal existence, perfection is an illusion, regardless of those who believe in its concept. Perfection is devoid of any value. Perfection, after all, implies you've reached the zenith. There is no possibility or potentiality. There is no room for imagination. There is no ability to visualize a concept. Perfection is limited by its own nature, which in short, is zero.
— Lionel Suggs
No one is perfect and perfectly holy but God alone".~R. Alan Woods [2012]
— R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is The Destination: A Photo Journal
Perfection can only be reached on the eyes of the one that loves you
— Sergio "BIMBO" Bautista
...But living creatures are idiosyncratic. They are created in such a way that they can actualize only what their microscopic minds wish for. The concept of limitless is bound heavily by the minor actualization of what perfection is...
— Lionel Suggs
On the Earth, you admire the Moon; on the Moon, you admire the Earth!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Since many things we see were once an idea, let us create good ideas today because they will be the realities of tomorrow! When you create an idea, do not forget that you shape the future! Idea is your God side! With ideas, you can change the universe, but only with very great ideas!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Looking for a saviour in the sky? Be serious! Know you still not that there ain’t any saviour but science! Get rid of your cultural craps and your religious illusions! Be realist! In this universe, only the realists have the chance to save themselves!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
There is no need to upset about the fact that our ancestors were monkeys, because they are capable chaps! Don’t be sad about the truth, just understand the truth!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
The stone you took away from a beach will long for that beach because it belongs there!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
A boat without port is free only until the storm breaks out!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Yes, human salvation will come through science, but only through the nature-respecting science!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Whichever point you reach in the future, that will be a miracle! If you reach tomorrow, that will be a miracle! If you reach next week or next year, that will be a miracle! Your every arrival to any point in the future time is a great victory!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Today’s warm houses will be the cold ruins in the very distant future!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Once you take sword in your hand, you will lose your right to talk about the peace! Man of peace and love never takes the sword in his hand!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
For a great willpower, no road has length!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
You can never be a giant if you do not challenge the powers much more powerful than you!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Some politicians are much noisier than the dogs! Just like teaching a dog how to hush, public must likewise teach those politicians to shush!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Don’t perceive the facts as a false criticism or else you lose badly! Because facts are facts and they need to be respected and be taken into consideration promptly!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?”“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
— Aristotle
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
— George Santayana, The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings
First sign of madness, talking to your own head.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
— Akira Kurosawa
And how do you know that you're mad? "To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?" I suppose so, said Alice. "Well then," the Cat went on, "you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags it's tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.
— Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.
— Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Temple
He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace
— Mikhail Lermontov
So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there's always madness. Madness is the emergency exit.
— Alan Moore, Batman: The Killing Joke
Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness? - The Joker
— Grant Morrison, Batman: Arkham Asylum
Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life...If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature...Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.
— C.G. Jung, The Red Book: A Reader's Edition
Soon madness has worn you down. It’s easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you’re worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.
— Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
Some are born mad, some achieve madness, and some have madness thrust upon 'em.
— Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls
Sometimes, to regain sanity, one had to acknowledge and embrace the madness.
— Morgan Rhodes, Rebel Spring
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
— R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
It's better to face madness with a plan than to sit still and let it take you in pieces.
— Josh Malerman, Bird Box
Madness breeds madness.
— Dan Brown, Inferno
Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow.
— Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall
Arthur felt happy. He was terribly pleased that the day was for once working out so much according to plan. Only twenty minutes ago he had decided he would go mad, and now here he was already chasing a Chesterfield sofa across the fields of prehistoric Earth.
— Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything
All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.
— Yann Martel, Life of Pi
I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.
— Charles Baudelaire
There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.
— Anaïs Nin, House of Incest
He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it... he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.
— Donald Barthelme
Without madness what is manBut a wholesome beast,Postponed corpse that begets?
— Fernando Pessoa, Poems of Fernando Pessoa
Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness
— Erich Segal
Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?
— Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.
— Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Great wits are to madness near alliedAnd thin partitions do their bounds divide.
— John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel
A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves
— Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary
Let me be mad, then, by all means! mad with the madness of Absinthe, the wildest, most luxurious madness in the world! Vive la folie! Vive l'amour! Vive l'animalisme! Vive le Diable!
— Marie Corelli, Wormwood: A Drama of Paris
You people would convict a grilled cheese sandwich of murder and the people wouldn’t question it.
— Charles Manson
O God, I love you to the edge of madness, Venetia, but I'm not mad yet--not so mad that I don't know how disastrous it might be to you--to us both! You don't realize what an advantage I should be taking of your innocence!
— Georgette Heyer, Venetia
Magnus hoped if he ever went mad like that himself, so mad that he poisoned the very air round him and hurt everyone he came into contact with, that there would be someone ho loved him enough to stop him. To kill him, if it came to that.
— Cassandra Clare, Saving Raphael Santiago
Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Masks of the Illuminati
If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us.--"The Content of the Psychoses
— C.G. Jung, The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease
Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.
— Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Canary
I have lived nearly fifty years, and I have seen life as it is. Pain, misery, hunger ... cruelty beyond belief. I have heard the singing from taverns and the moans from bundles of filth on the streets. I have been a soldier and seen my comrades fall in battle ... or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I have held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no gallant last words ... only their eyes filled with confusion, whimpering the question, "Why?"I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
— Dale Wasserman, Man of La Mancha
A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself.
— Tom Stoppard
The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness.
— Mick Jagger
There nearly always is a method in madness.
— G.K. Chesterton
Everyone is more or less mad on one point.
— Rudyard Kipling
He knew that Hop-Frog was not fond of wine
—  for it excited the poor cripple almost to madness
One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness
— Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Love is a temporary madness; it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.” ~Louis de Bernieres
— Louis de Bernières, Corelli's Mandolin
In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Love is never enough. Madness is enough. It is complete, sufficient unto itself. You can only stand outside it as a woman might stand outside a prison in which her lover is locked up. From time to time, a well-loved face will peer out and love floods back. A scrap of cloth flutters and it becomes a sign and a code and a message and all that you want it to be. Then it vanishes and you are outside the dark tower again.
— Jerry Pinto, Em and The Big Hoom
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.
— Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we're lucky we're Odysseus tied up to the ship's mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we're not at all lucky, we're another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl
Once upon a time there was aOnce upon a time there was aOnce upon a time there was aStop this. It's undignified.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing.
— Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew And Her Friends
Bashere shrugged, grinning brhind his grey-streaked moustaches, "When I first slept in a saddle, Muad Cheade was Marshal-General. The man was as mad as a hare in spring thaw. Twice every day he searched his bodyservant for poison, and he drank nothing but vinegar and water which he claimed was sovereign against the poison the fellow fed him, but he ate everything the man prepared for as long as I knew him. Once he had a grove of oaks chopped down because they were looking at him. And then insisted they be given decent funerals; he gave the oration. Do you have any idea how long it takes to dig graves for twenty-three oak trees?" "Why didn't somebody do something? His Family?" "Those not as mad as him, or madder, were afraid to look at him sideways. Tenobia's father wouldn't have let anyone touch Cheade anyway. He might have been insane, but he could outgeneral anyone I ever saw. He never lost a battle. He never even came close to losing.
— Robert Jordan, Lord of Chaos
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
— G.K. Chesterton, Manalive
I am aware that humans believe they are the sole owners of this curse, but all creatures love, Dieter. Love is our one shared madness, our one shared burden. All creatures are driven against sense by it, and even the lowest ant will die madly for her queen.
— B. Justin Shier, Zero Sum
One is always considered mad when one perfects something that others cannot grasp.
— Ed Wood
Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession, their madness is less often remarked. 
— Michael Gruber, The Book of Air and Shadows
To begin cooking duck at one in the morning is one of the finest acts of madness that can be undertaken by a human being who is not mad.
— Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, La Soledad Del Manager
If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale
— John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929
Sir,' I interrupted him, 'you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady; you speak of her with hate --- with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel --- she cannot help being mad.
— Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.
— Paolo Bacigalupi, The Drowned Cities
This is what I am talking about: the bewitching power of moonlight. Moonlight incites dark passions like a cold flame, making hearts burning with the intensity of phosphorus.
— Rampo Edogawa
Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find the means frightening.
— Floriano Martins
Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn't allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he'd have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what he'd really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again.
— David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
The most work he did on [the urinals] was to run a brush once or twice apiece, singing some song as loud as he could in time to the swishing brush; then he'd splash in some Clorox and he'd be through. ... And when the Big Nurse...came in to check McMurphy's cleaning assignment personally, she brought a little compact mirror and she held it under the rim of the bowls. She walked along shaking her head and saying, "Why, this is an outrage... an outrage..." at every bowl. McMurphy sidled right along beside her, winking down his nose and saying in answer, "No; that's a toilet bowl...a TOILET bowl.
— Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.
— Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,Shakes so my single state of manThat function is smothered in surmise,And nothing is but what is not.
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill
He methodically basted the dark skin of the Alsatian, which he had stuffed with garlic and herbs."One rule in life", he murmured to himself. "If you can smell garlic, everything is all right".
— J.G. Ballard, High-Rise
There are those to whom one must advise madness.
— Joseph Joubert
Se o problema são os demónios estrangula-os com a tua loucura.If the problem is the demons strangle them with your madness.
— Victor Eustáquio, O Carrossel de Lúcifer
I was in the situation of someone who has assumed, all his life, that madness was on eway, and suddenly in its grip, discovers that it is not only different from the way he'd imagined but that the person suffering from it is someone else, and that this someone else is not interested in finding out what madness is like: he is simply immersed in it, or it has descended on him, and that's that.
— Felisberto Hernández, Piano Stories
Can one man's madness be another's real life?
— Emma Frances Dawson, An Itinerant House, And Other Ghost Stories
Azhrarn the Beautiful," said Chuz lovingly, "it is your beautiful madness I have come to see.
— Tanith Lee, Delusion's Master
I walked into my own book, seeking peace.It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.
— Anaïs Nin, House of Incest
Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by impelling us to seek remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and the ignorance of the future..
— Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
«…you’re too old not to have had, how shall I say, certain experiences. You’ve had bad internet dates. You’ve had people be creeps to you. You’ve seen what you’ve seen; you’ve felt what you’ve felt. Ideology is for people who don’t trust their own experiences and perceptions of the world»«I feel like I am going mad»«Madness is actually quite rare in individuals. It’s groups of people who go mad. Countries, cults ... religions»
— Douglas Coupland
I swear that each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant - impossible socially, but full-scale - and that it's the knockings and baterrings we sometimes hear in each other that keeps our intercourse from utter banaility.
— Elizabeth Bowen
No idea with who has no idea
— Nomoto
Sometimes I wonder if the human race isn't collectively as mad as a sack of door knobs.
— Jasper Fforde
I'm like a machine being run over its RPM limit. The bearings are overheating: a minute longer and the metal will melt and start dripping and that will be the end of everything. I need a splash of cold water, logic; I pour it on in buckets but the logic hisses on the hot bearings and dissipates in the air as a fleeting white mist
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd always hoped that someday I'd be able to use it.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History
The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language.
— Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
In the midst of our worried searching we recklessly abandon the treasures that life has bestowed upon us in the mad hunt for that which we wish to bestow upon ourselves.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Marcus turned his back to her. He feared that if he saw her face, it might weaken his resolve. Love was indeed a madness.
— Jennifer McKeithen, Atlantis On the Shores of Forever
We can go mad whenever we like. We can leave our minds behind and play in the garden at night. The gate is always open. And the moon is always bright.
— JJ Vladimir
Revirgination surgery for women is the fastest growing segment within the Indian cosmetic surgery industry. But any culture that decides a woman’s worth by the presence or absence of a membrane needs to examine its collective head.
— Mallika Nawal
All they see is madness. It’s the same with the other men. They see my situation, not me.
— Eliza Granville, Gretel and the Dark
You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.
— Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
There is a madness in me that does not follow society.
— Avijeet Das
Love is a mental madness.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Maybe I was crazy about you. Maybe I was just crazy.
— samin
Act – make an event. Smash the coordinates and see where the smithereens fly. Let in the madness, and be sure to be a danger to oneself and others. Too much thinking turns you into that fool Hamlet.
— Hanif Kureishi, The Nothing
The last madness I’ll probably persist in is to believe myself a poet: it will be up to the critics to cure me.
— Gérard de Nerval, Selected Writings
Hail fellow well meet on the highway to madness. Madness is a small town very far away. Most of us, at some point, find we probably could walk there. Others have a road cave in and dump them there.
— Helen Slavin, The Extra Large Medium
There was a madness in my story, but it was a madness I understood.
— Stephen King, Bag of Bones
It was an endless, consuming nightmare that she escaped only in madness.And then the escape was not complete. Part of her knew, always.
— Elizabeth Lowell, Midnight in Ruby Bayou
The cab driver is staring at me in his mirror. I'm talking to myself."The second sign of madness," I explain."What's the first one?""Killing lots of people and eating their genitals."He laughs and sneaks another look at me.
— Michael Robotham, Lost
It's madness, of course', thought Moist. 'But now I've got it, too.
— Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
The picture of the bacchante who stands motionless and stares into space must have been well known. Catullus is thinking of her when he tells of the abandoned Ariadne, who follows her faithless lover with sorrowing eyes as she stands on the reedy shore ‘like the picture of a maenad.’ Indeed, melancholy silence becomes the sign of women who are possessed by Dionysus. […]Madness dwells in the surge of clanging, shrieking, and pealing sounds, it dwells also in silence. The women who follow Dionysus get their name, maenads, from this madness. Possessed by it, they rush off, whirl madly in circles, or stand still, as if turned to stone.
— Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult
I will put warm woolen socks on the feet of the people in the other world; but I dream and cannot wake, and I am cast over the cliff and hang there by two fingers that are danced and trampled on by the giant unreality.
— Janet Frame, Faces in the Water
Their hearts were all cycling through the same madness - the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair - like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun. Each containing their own unique gravity. Their own force of attractions. Drawing near and holding fast to whatever entered their own atmosphere ... they would find love and lost love and recover from love and love again.
— Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
Her presence incites madness within me and yet it calms me.
— samin
I thought I knew madness, but I didn’t know it before you.
— Kitty Thomas, The Last Girl
We yearn for a stranger to poke around in our heart. Such an irrational thing it is. Flutter once and lunacy behold.
— H.S. Crow
How do you stand it?" she said."Stand what?""All... this." Ella threw out her arm. "Does it not make you mad?"Clem glanced up. 'Much madness is divinest sense,' She said, and gave a small laugh. "There are plenty of mad women in here. I'm not sure I'm one of them though." She shrugged. "You'll get used to it.
— Anna Hope, The Ballroom
Madness is born in the blood. It is my birthright.
— Grant Morrison, Batman: Arkham Asylum - A Serious House on Serious Earth
The first part of madness is believing what you hear. The Second is acting on it.
— Sam Hawksmoor, The Hunting
He discriminated against neither the avaricious nor the prodigal: both were committed to the asylum
—  this led people to say that the alienist's concept of madness included practically everybody.
Love is one of society's many socially accepted forms of madness.
— Luke Rhinehart, The Dice Man
Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent.
— Machado de Assis, O Alienista
They sent spies", Gramma went on, her voice a hush, "and they look like one man, but they can split into two, then four, and so on. I've seen it before. During the war. It's a Communist trick and they taught it to the Democrats so that they could take our guns. I would have fought them off, but they already made the shotgun disappear.
— Barry Lyga, Game
I'm not sure what the moral of the bathroom-stool story is. Perhaps this: it's a good idea to settle for a few loose ends, because even if everything in your life is connected to everything else, that way madness lies.
— Lorna Sage, Bad Blood
Alice asked the Cheshire Cat who was sitting in a tree "What road do I take?"The cat asked, "Where do you want to go?""I don't know " answered Alice. "Then, said the cat, it really doesn't matter, does it?
— Lewis Carroll
As Carl Jung put it, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.” As Pink Floyd sang, “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.
— David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
Joe is never sure whether they're mad or just alarmingly and uncompromisingly incapable of self-delusion.
— Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker
If all the people break, and all the world breaks, and everyone and everything goes mad, then I can be normal, just like everyone else, right?
— Jun Mochizuki, Pandora Hearts 24巻
Everyone says she’s mad.’‘How do they know?’ I asked.‘Because she’s different from other people, I suppose.’‘Is that being mad?’‘No. Not really, I suppose madness is not seeing things as others see them.
— Ruskin Bond, The Best of Ruskin Bond
All scholars are a bit mad. All obsessions are dangerous.
— A.S. Byatt, Possession
Oh, you are mad!" she exclaimed, quite out of patience."Possibly. But I like my madness.
— Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche
When the thin line between love and hatred faded away completely, madness sprang back to life inside the numb hearts.
— Akshay Vasu
But the nightmare was a strange comfort to me; in it, I found a sense of escape, and were it possible to go live in that nightmare, I would have, bizzare though that may sound.
— M.D. Elster, Four Kings
Mad is a label we attach to people we find disruptive and confusing.
— Merlyn Gabriel Miller, Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness
I keep forgetting that if you live in a big city only mad people talk to themselves.
— Jeanette Winterson, Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days
He's no idiot, in fact he's a genius... and that's as far from an idiot as you can get without reaching madness.
— Mike Judge
Of Love and Other Demons (Vintage International) - Gabriel GarcÍA MÁRquez (Highlight: 5; Note: 0)-------------"Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning."(Chapter:Chapter Two)"What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you. And regarding that there can be no doubt, for it is He in His infinite diligence who has enlightened us so that we may offer you this consolation.”"(Chapter:Chapter Two)"Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses"(Chapter:Chapter Two)"Take care,” said Delaura. “Sometimes we attribute certain things we do not understand to the demon, not thinking they may be things of God that we do not understand.”"(Chapter:Chapter Three)". He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. "(Chapter:Chapter Five)
— Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons
The problem with mad people is not that they are mad, but that they are suffering from a particular brand of madness that the majority are not.
— Merlyn Gabriel Miller, Sex, Death, Drugs & Madness
Their eyes persecuted him everywhere, eventually following him all the way into the darkness around his bed and into his dreams, like a madness that threatened to overpower him.
— Carsten Jensen, We, the Drowned
Indeed if one had just seen him at the end of the evening with the dusk and the mist of the fenlands close behind him he might have believed that in the dusk and the mist was an army that followed this gay worn confident man. Had the army been there Niv was sane.Had the world accepted that an army was there, still he was sane. But the lonely fancy that had not fact to feed on, nor the fancy of any other for fellowship, was for its loneliness mad.
— Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter
Emotions had welled close to the surface, and she thought her heart had never felt so full as it did standing next to the defiled grave of a whore while lunatics sang the national anthem.
— Mindy McGinnis, A Madness So Discreet
His own naivety taunted him like a flicker of madness.
— Jane Harper
She saw him like he was the only star in the whole damn sky. Like he was the only bridge between her sanity and madness.
— Akshay Vasu
It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want to see (Nicole to Dick).
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
Make me a shadow on the wall!
— Kate Griffin
Over the years of the Cultural Revolution, I was to witness people being attacked for saying "thank you" too often, which was branded as "bourgeois hypocrisy"; courtesy was on the brink of extinction.
— Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go.
— Stephen King, It
My madness is instigating me to join the club of billionaires.
— Tanmaya Guru
Madness is like gravity, you just need to push it...
— Deyth Banger
Brave, impossible Alice. Stop being so sensible.
— Emory R. Frie, Wonderland
It is impossible for the sane to truly understand madness.
— Lance Conrad, The Price of Loyalty
Creators almost always go mad.
— Osho, Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within
Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.
— Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
We're like little kids. We are little kids, but don't tell us that—we're having a fantastic time. We have our little house, and live our little life. We are the perfect young husband and wife. We have nonstop dinner parties—the glorious food, the fabulous friends, the gallons of wine. I sometimes feel as if I've raced off a cliff and am spinning my legs in midair, like Wile E. Coyote. But I'm fine. It's fine. It's all going to be fine. Crazy people don't have dinner parties, do they? No.
— Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
Blackmail threats are e-mails from madmen.
— Michael Bassey Johnson, Master of Maxims
But in the morning I would always rise and polish the surface of myself, a gleaming, confident young woman, an excellent student and good daughter starting her fourth year at the university, moving smoothly through the world, and even though inside the chaos scraped and railed I would push it into the crevices of the day so it could not be detected.
— Carolina De Robertis, Perla
For him, behind every feeling and thought was the sense of the open door leading into nothingness. To be sure, he suffered from dread of many things, of madness, the police, insomnia, and also dread of death. But everything he dreaded he likewise desired and longed for at the same time. He was full of burning curiosity about suffering, destruction, persecution, madness and death.
— Hermann Hesse, Klingsors letzter Sommer
Run mad as often as you choose but do not faint
— Jane Austen
That's call reverse, craziness and madness (Kill Game 2016).
— Deyth Banger
Worry whispered through his mind like madness. Mad Dog had refused to leave his family, and in the end, it had cost all of them their lives. Ryder swore he’d find a way to leave before anything happened to Lauren.
— Cindy Skaggs, Live By The Team
But only in mad people fear goes on constant night and day, wearing one ditch in the mind that all thoughts must travel in.
— Josephine Winslow Johnson, Now in November
It would be superfluous todrive us mad, my dear Watson
— Arthur Conan Doyle
But these people _announced_ their madness . . . they flaunted their insanity, they weren't half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it.
— Zadie Smith
Boasting about badness without actively involving in badness is mere madness.
— Michael Bassey Johnson, Master of Maxims
The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.
— G.K. Chesterton
As you see you can't change what has happen in past if I could I do my best to don't happen in other words I will fix the error, like not watching this stupid film or video and this minutes which have taken to do this stuff, to be used for extra time in the future. But unfortunately I wake up and hear "Hello, Hello, hey, hey you are living reality what you want is madness!
— Deyth Banger
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad . . .
— Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay
The only people who are worth knowing are either saints, scoundrels or madmen; at least their conversation is always interesting. Sensible people are dull by definition, because they are always harping on to the same boring tune about everyday life. They form part of the crowd, the more intelligent part perhaps, but the crowd for all that, and I’m sick of them.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans
That rational voice was right to be frightened. There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump.
— Stephen King, Skeleton Crew
Were all mad here
— Alice and Wonderland
In a mad world, only the mad are sane. - AKIRA KUROSAWA
— Michael R. Fletcher, Beyond Redemption
Since I neither want not can influence the events of the world, my mission is to preserve the internal integrity and equilibrium of my mind; that will be in which the manor in which I recover the purity of the original act; I shall be my own citadel, and to it I shall retire to protect myself against a hostile and corrupt world. I shall be my own citadel and, within it, my own and only citizen.
— Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra
The reality I submerse myself in when writing, is far greater than the physical reality surrounding me at work!
— D. P . Hall
She looked at me again, and the sweet and shy Nicole disappeared. Her eyes b
— Kelley Armstrong, The Calling
I'm beginning to think information is our addictive madness.
— Goenawan Mohamad, Percikan: Kumpulan Twitter @gm_gm Goenawan Mohamad
Nowadays I just don’t care; I’ve taken the Frank Zappa stance. I am who I am! Some love me, some loathe me, some respect me and some despise me. But after all that’s been, I still love the insane! As they’re exciting, dangerous and highly explosive! For me mad dogs are gentlemen.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
Fuck the rabbit, eat it and go after a lion.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life