Samuel Taylor Coleridge Quotes

Madmen always think it's the others who are mad.

In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.

… the ravings of a maniac

He stares at me, and then leans back in his chair. "He's ill, Jacob." I say nothing. "He's a paragon schnitzophonic." "He's what?!" "Paragon schnitzophonic," repeats Uncle Al. "You mean paranoid schizophrenic?" "Sure. Whatever. But the bottom line is he's mad as a hatter.

When you are insane, you are busy being insane - all the time.

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.

First sign of madness, talking to your own head.

This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.

The logic of a madman is a sane man's confusion.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.

Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God.

My experience is that when one is in psychosis, you're on a mission and nothing is going to stop you. At some level your brain is telling you you probably shouldn't be doing this, but you're on a mission.

In a mad world, only the mad are sane.

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad.

In my most psychotic stages, I imagine myself chewing on sidewalks and bulging and swallowing sunlight and clouds.

In a psychiatric hospital, a lot of people believe that people on TV are talking to them directly through the screen. I'm with about 500 of these people, and I'm on TV every Friday night. As I was queuing up for breakfast one morning, one guy nearly jumped out of his skin. My first thought was to go 'Woooo!'

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.

Perhaps I'm absolutely bonkers and don't know it. Perhaps I'm psychotically mental.

... madness entered my veins.

... the work of lunatics.

... a paranoid person with delusions.

Everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own ways.

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.

Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.

In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.