Maddest Quotes & Sayings

Sometimes I feel sure he is as mad as a hatter and then, just as he is at his maddest, I find there is a method in his madness. — Agatha Christie

A religion is not the church a man goes to but the cosmos he lives in; and if any sceptic forgets it, the maddest fanatic beating an Orange drum about the Battle of the Boyne is a better philosopher than he. — G.K. Chesterton

Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad. — Norman O. Brown

Is Bronson mad! Let me ask you! How else can I be? I'm probably the maddest guy on two legs if the truth was known, but prison will never beat me, I'd sooner die today than allow it too! — Stephen Richards

One of the things I learned in my maddest years was that one could be in a room, with walls and barred windows and locks on the doors, surrounded by other crazy people, or even stuffed into an isolation cell all alone, but that really wasn't the room one was in at all. The real room that one occupied was constructed by memory, by relationships, by events, by all sorts of unseen forces. Sometimes delusions. Sometimes hallucinations. Sometimes desires. Sometimes dreams and hopes, or ambitions. Sometimes anger. That was what was important: to always recognize where the real walls were. (176) — John Katzenbach

I was aware that he was laughing at me, but I told myself I didn't care what other people thought and would dress how I liked. Of course, like many self-consciously wacky people, I was in fact paralyzed by fear of the opinions of others and made the effort to appear as the maddest of the mad headbangers just in case anyone had the slightest lingering doubt as to the depth of my devotion. In fact, I think my disguise felt so fragile I couldn't allow it a single crack. If I did it might fall to bits and leave the real me shrivelling under the evaluating gaze of my peer group. — Mark Barrowcliffe

Too much sanity may be madness - and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be! — Dale Wasserman

Texas is undeniable ... We were already almost out of America and yet definitely in it and in the middle of where it's maddest. — Jack Kerouac

Some of the people who look the most normal are probably the maddest people trying to look normal. — Roddy Doyle

Bono: But you write. Why do you write?
Michka: well, because I'm unable to express things in another way. I often believe that the words that come out of my mouth are not the ones I should be using. I can't cut things loose unless I'm really sure about them.
It's good, but sometimes it's an excuse.
Bono: That's often an excuse. You have to dare to fail. I think that's the big one: fear of failure. I've never had a fear of failure. Isn't that mad?
Michka: that's the maddest thing, but at the same time I think that's the secret. Because you've never been afraid of making a fool of yourself, you've never been afraid of looking ridiculous. — Michka Assayas

It's the people we love the most who can make us feel the gladdest ... and the maddest! Love and anger are such a puzzle! — Fred Rogers

One thing was certain: Human Time was the saddest, maddest, most devastating variety of time that had ever existed. She tried her best to ignore it. — Elizabeth Gilbert

What made me maddest was the media treatment of the BPP, which gave the impression that the Party was racist and violent. And it worked. The pigs would burst into a Panther office, shoot first, and ask questions later. The press always reported that the police had "uncovered" a large arsenal of weapons. Later, when the "arsenal" turned out to be a few legally registered rifles and shotguns, the press never printed a word. The same thing goes on today. — Assata Shakur

A plaster girl with intense glass eyes sat astride a bicycle pedaling at the maddest pace; though its wheel spokes spun hypnotically, the bicycle of course never budged: all that effort and the poor girl going nowhere. It was a pitifully human situation, and one that Sylvia could so exactly identify with herself that she always felt a real pang. — Truman Capote

the madness business is filled with people like Tony, reduced to their maddest edges. — Jon Ronson

Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges. — Jon Ronson

The influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

But sometimes we get the maddest at the people we love the most. — Cinda Williams Chima

Take my advice and live for a long, long time. Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die. — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

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

When you're young, you think life is forever, but it's finite. I'm 68, so even by the maddest measurements, I'm in the last bit of life. — Joanna Lumley

Three hundred pages of cotton-soft parchment, bound up with a green ribbon. Her writing gushed in watery ripples over the pages, penmanship that called to mind the maddest intricate Belgian lace. Wrought on a pin's head but stretching for miles if unraveled. — Lyndsay Faye

Hark, I hear a robin calling!
List, the wind is from the south!
And the orchard-bloom is falling
Sweet as kisses on the mouth.
In the dreamy vale of beeches
Fair and faint is woven mist,
And the river's orient reaches
Are the palest amethyst.
Every limpid brook is singing
Of the lure of April days;
Every piney glen is ringing
With the maddest roundelays.
Come and let us seek together
Springtime lore of daffodils,
Giving to the golden weather
Greeting on the sun-warm hills. — Lucy Maud Montgomery

'Tis the maddest trick a man can ever play in his whole life, to let his breath sneak out of his body without any more ado, and without so much as a rap o'er the pate, or a kick of the guts; to go out like the snuff of a farthing candle, and die merely of the mulligrubs, or the sullens. — Miguel De Cervantes

The animals you say were 'sent' for man's free use and nutriment. Pray, then, inform me, and be candid, why came they aeons before man did, to spend long centuries on earth. Awaiting their devourer's birth? Those ill-timed chattels, sent from heaven, were, sure, the maddest gift e'er given - 'sent' for man's use (can man believe it?) when there was no man to receive it! — Henry Stephens Salt

You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear; To-morrow'll be the happiest time of all the glad New Year,- Of all the glad New Year, mother, the maddest, merriest day; For I'm to be Queen o' the May, mother, I'm to be queen o' the May. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true. — Paul Graham

Hope your wildest hopes, dream your maddest dreams, imagine your most fantastic fantasies. Where your hopes and your dreams and your imagination leave off, the love of my Heavenly Father only begins. — Brennan Manning

Some of the madmen are really fun to be with. I soon learnt to relate to them. I soon became one of them. I ended up the maddest of the mad. There is no madder than myself! Please believe it. — Stephen Richards

Life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility. — Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

It is, I believe, one of the few dangerous forms of eccentricity, a highly contagious mania, to be precise, of the rampant social variety! In your friend's case, we may not yet be dealing with out-and-out insanity ... No ... Maybe his trouble is only exaggerated conviction ... But the contagious manias are well known to me! ... I've known a good many sufferers from conviction mania ... Of many different types ... And in the last analysis, those who talk about justice seem to be the maddest of the lot! ... At first, I must confess, I took a certain interest in justice fanatics ... Today those particular maniacs annoy and exasperate me more than I can tell ... Don't you feel the same way? ... Human beings show a strange aptitude for transmitting this mania. It terrifies me, and we find it, mind you, in all human beings! — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

And yet she was content to pair off with this dull young adventurer in the tarnished lace! It was, he supposed, the sort of thing to be expected of a sex that all philosophy had taught him to regard as the maddest part of a mad species. — Rafael Sabatini

The irony, as Slate's Amanda Marcotte has observed, is that conservatives are surely maddest at and most threatened by powerful single women - the privileged, well-positioned women who earn money, wield influence, enjoy national visibility, and have big voices: Anita Hill, Murphy Brown, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham. — Rebecca Traister

Of all mad faiths maddest is the faith that we can get rid of faith. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world - in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his own morality, the realism of conquests. — Albert Camus

It has been observed, [that for the federal government] to coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised. — Alexander Hamilton

I looked at her for three seconds, or five perhaps, with fearful hatred-that hate which is only a hair's-breath from love, from the maddest love! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky