Mark Lawrence Quotes

In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets?

Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

I teach that all men are mad.

The first step towards madness is to think oneself wise.

Insanity is a very high art form. If everyone was insane, I wouldn't be here!

Sometimes it’s only madness that makes us what we are.

You, and in fact quite a lot of your generation, have in some way been exiled from that particular sanctuary. It's become almost impossible for someone to "go mad" in the classical sense. At one time people conveniently "went mad" and were never heard from again. Like a character in a romantic novel. But now you are too hip to yourself on a psychological level. You all are too intimate with too many of the symptoms of insanity to be caught completely off your guard.

I have toyed with the idea of playing it straight. But, like I say, I really believe we are all out of our minds at some level.

Death is part of who we are. It guides us. It shapes us. It drives us to madness. Can you still be human if you have no mortal end

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

There is no insanity so devastating in man's life as utter sanity.

[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.

Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that we are all mad.

You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.

I'd rather stay here with all the madmen than perish with the sadmen roaming free.

If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect by madness.

Forced to recognize our inhumanity, our reason coexists with our insanity. And though we choose between reality and madness, it's either sadness or euphoria.

Is it you and I who are crazy, or is it everybody else?

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.