Maxim Gorky Quotes

I think it's probably a good thing to be considered stable, but with a capacity for madness.

I try not to think. It interferes with being nuts" - Leo Valdez

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

Is it so far from madness to wisdom?" - Daenerys Targaryen

I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.

Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And-how many of us do know it? ... Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses-what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city, here. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse, the truth...?

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.

With the truth so dull and depressing, the only working alternative is wild bursts of madness and filigree.

We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.

Men are mad and gods are madder, she told the grass, and the grass murmured its agreement.

I tell you, my friends,’ he said one day. ‘I tell you that I am the only sane man in the regiment. It’s the others that are mad, but they don’t know it. They fight a war and they don’t know what for. Isn’t that crazy? How can one man kill another and not really know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different colour uniform and speaks a different language? And it’s me they call mad!

Losing my mind sounds so pessimistic. I prefer the term winning my insanity.

Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you should be cleansed? Behold, I show you the Superman. He is this lightning, he is this madness.

There are worse things than being mad.

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

By tomorrow at this time, I think you're going to have a much better idea of what crazy is. -- Ev Hillman

Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense.

There have been a number of philosophers who have reveled in the dismantling of truth. I think they did so with good ethical motives, and for good philosophical reasons. I can see the sense in what they were talking about; the idea that truth is often claimed by elites in order to further certain agendas. They crowd-out alternative perspectives - particularly those of the powerless. But the undermining of truth contributed - in the weird, indirect way that philosophy contributes to the culture - to a rejection of the idea of truth as having any kind of proper meaning at all.

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

Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of our neighbor's children?

This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that--a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice--or if we notice, belittle--equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

That's the nice thing about insanity: evil people kill you, but crazy ones try to make you understand.

A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.