No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
~ Aristotle

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

We are all born mad. Some remain so.
~ Samuel Beckett

The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me: hell might afford my miseries a shelter; therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all bolted against me.
~ William Cowper

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.
~ T. S. Eliot

Insanity destroys reason, but not wit.
~ Nathaniel Emmons

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.
~ Desiderius Erasmus

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get into accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.
~ Sigmund Freud

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

Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.
~ Baltasar Gracian

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

You want to hear about insanity? I was found running naked through the jungles in Mexico. At the Mexico City airport, I decided I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing on takeoff. My body... my liver... okay, my brain... went.
~ Dennis Hopper

I teach that all men are mad.
~ Horace

I may be crazy but it keeps me from going insane.
~ Waylon Jennings

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.
~ Rudyard Kipling

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
~ Oscar Levant

Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children.
~ Samuel Levenson

I'm a nut, but not just a nut.
~ Bill Murray

Insanity in individuals is something rare -- but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche