Madhouse Quotes & Sayings

And it all flew away like a dream
even my passion, and yet it really was strong and true, but ... where has it gone now? Indeed the thought occasionally flits through my head: Didn't I go out of my mind then and spend the whole time sitting in a madhouse somewhere, and maybe I'm sitting there now
so that for me it was all a seeming and only seems to this day. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. — Friedrich Nietzsche

So be careful when you bend over. — Charles Bukowski

In Jung's terms-that we noted previously-the work is the artist's own transference projection, and he knows that consciously and critically. Whatever he does he is stuck with himself, can't get securely outside and beyond himself. He is also stuck with the work of art itself. Like any material achievement it is visible, earthly, impermanent. No matter how great it is, it still pales in some ways next to the transcending majesty of nature; and so it is ambiguous, hardly a solid immortality symbol. In his greatest genius man is still mocked. No matter that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship, that the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. The artist and the madman are trapped by their own fabrications; they wallow in their own anality, in their protest that they really are something special in creation. — Ernest Becker

This is a madhouse!" said Horace. Deirdre laughed. "No, doveling. It's a menagerie. — Ransom Riggs

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock. — Anna Freud

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it - just as though one were in a madhouse or prison. — Anton Chekhov

It's not the large things that send a man to the madhouse ... no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies ... not the death of his love but the shoelace that snaps with no time left. — Charles Bukowski

The world is, for the most part, a collective madhouse, and practically everyone, however "normal" his facade, is faking sanity. — John Astin

Between incomprehensible and incoherent sits the madhouse. I am not in the madhouse. — Jack Kerouac

But madness? That small remnant of altered consciousness, pure or in response to circumstances. Circumstances of life, even those of the body itself and its chemistry. How cruel and stupid to punish this as we do with ostracism and fear, to have forged a network of fear, strong as the locks and bars of a back ward. This 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. — Kate Millett

This is the woman who stopped the Stanford Prison Study. When I said it got out of control, I was the prison superintendent. I didn't know it was out of control. I was totally indifferent. She came down, saw that madhouse and said, "You know what, it's terrible what you're doing to those boys. They're not prisoners, they're not guards, they're boys, and you are responsible." And I ended the study the next day. The good news is I married her the next year. — Philip Zimbardo

We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign - and no memories. The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. — Joseph Conrad

I have consumed more drink than the first
one hundred men you will pass
on the street
or meet in the madhouse.
I scratch my belly and dream of the
albatross.
I have joined the great drunks of
the centuries:
Li Po, Toulouse-Lautrec, Crane, Faulkner.
I have been selected
but by whom? — Charles Bukowski

I don't know how he does it but every woman he meets is crazy. he will get rid of one crazy woman but he never gets any relief - another crazy moves right in with him. it's only after they move in and begin acting more than strange that they admit to him that they've done madhouse time or that their families have a long history of mental illness. — Charles Bukowski

Weed, are you familiar with the work of Carl Linnaeus? His Systema Naturae describes a classification system for all growing things."
Weed's eyes dart everywhere, probing every corner. "Unless he visited the madhouse, I never met him," he replies. — Maryrose Wood

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable. — G.K. Chesterton

Everyone wants the same; everyone is the
same; he who has other sentiments goes voluntarily into the madhouse. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself. — Charles Bukowski

Dear Lord, what a madhouse the world is! — Leo Tolstoy

Goddammit!" Zane lashed out without warning and hit the water bottle, sending it skidding across the carpet and splattering at Julian's feet. "I'm gonna end up in the fucking madhouse because of you!" He reached out and grabbed Ty's wrist, pulling him closer. "Loving you is going to make me fucking insane! I said no, and I mean it! — Abigail Roux

There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse. — Thomas B. Macaulay

Once you start seeing this place for the madhouse it is, you can't stop seeing it that way. It's everywhere, everyone. It doesn't make any sense. That's not life. It can't be. I don't know what it is, but it's not life. — Jed McKenna

Already all confusion. Things and imaginings. As of always. Confusion amounting to nothing. Despite precautions. If only she could be pure figment. Unalloyed. This old so dying woman. So dead. In the madhouse of the skull and nowhere else. Where no more precautions to be taken. No precautions possible. Cooped up there with the rest. Hovel and stones. The lot. And the eye. How simple all then. If only all could be pure figment. Neither be nor been nor by any shift to be. Gently gently. On. Careful. — Samuel Beckett

Too long, the earth has been a madhouse! — Friedrich Nietzsche

How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: carriages made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, men attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this immortality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value. — Anne Rice

You have to accept this reality as the madhouse walls bulge break and the terrified insane flood our ugly streets. you have to accept terrible reality. — Charles Bukowski

I run blindly through the madhouse ... And I cannot even pray ... For I have no God. — Grant Morrison

Performers always come back from the Edinburgh festival with adventure stories. Watts told a few: meeting a young kilt maker who spent a year in a madhouse after eating too much LSD, and accompanying Seattle actor and musician Michael McQuilken (of Collaborator Productions) to the hospital after a Frisbee accident. He reached up to catch it and cut his hand on a sign, .. He had to get a few stitches, but I think he can still play. — Reggie Watts

Told me that when you bury emotions like that, you're only pissing them off ... making them stronger, because you're burying them alive. They don't like that, and one day they'll make sure that you don't like it either. — Rob Thurman

It's the fault of the chess players themselves. I don't know what they used to be, but now they're not the most gentlemanly group. When it was a game played by the aristocrats it had more like you know dignity to it. When they used to have the clubs, like no women were allowed and everybody went in dressed in a suit, a tie, like gentlemen, you know. Now, kids come running in their sneakers. Even in the best chess club-and they got women in there. It's a social place and people are making noise, it's a madhouse. — Bobby Fischer

Monk was a gentle person, gentle and beautiful, but he was strong as an ox. And if I had ever said something about punching Monk out in front of his face - and I never did - then somebody should have just come and got me and taken me to the madhouse, because Monk could have just picked my little ass up and thrown me through a wall. — Miles Davis

Oh, who am I trying to kid? It's a madhouse. The minute those cameras go off, things just explode, everyone is just at each other in one way or another, in closets or cat fights here and there. It's nuts. You know, I can't be a part of it. — Richard Dean Anderson

The Zulu is only outside the bars of a madhouse because there are no madhouses provided by his tribe ... primitives are far more aberrated than civilized peoples. Their savageness, their unprogressiveness, their incidence of illness ... — L. Ron Hubbard

Small steps to the madhouse still get us there at last — Gregory Maguire

Is not all the stupid chatter of most of our newspapers the babble of fools who suffer from the fixed idea of morality, legality, christianity and so forth, and only seem to go about free because the madhouse in which they walk takes in so broad a space? — Max Stirner

If you say to a man: "Eighteen hundred years ago the dead were raised," he will reply: "Yes, I know that." And if you say: "A hundred thousand years from now all the dead will be raised," he will probably reply: "I presume so." But if you tell him: "I saw a dead man raised to-day," he will ask, "From what madhouse have you escaped?" The — Robert G. Ingersoll

Welcome to the madhouse. Feel free to stay as long as you'd like, but as long as you're here, there are rules to be followed."
"Like?"
"Like betray me and I kill you. Lie to me and I kill you. Ignore an order and I kill you. Otherwise, do whatever the hell you want. You think you can handle that?"
"As long as you don't talk down to me because I'm a woman. You pull some misogynistic shit and I'll kill you. We got a deal?"
Those words, they do something to me, hearing that threat come from her lips, so at odds with that low, sultry voice. It makes me hard in an instant. — J.M. Darhower

The whole of life has become an institution, a madhouse in which duties are to be fulfilled not love; in which you have to behave, not be spontaneous; in which a pattern has to be followed, not the overflow of life and energy. That's why the mind thinks and decides everything, because there is danger. — Rajneesh

City is a madhouse! Don't stay there too much or you get mad! Go to the nature, to the Temple of the Clever! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Build a fence around the South and you'd have one big madhouse. — Florence King

When you get to my age, and I'm 66 now, you realize that the world is a madhouse and that most people are operating in fantasy anyway. So once you realise that, it doesn't bother you much. — John Cleese

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Dark City Blue is a freight train of a thriller crashing through some madhouse city night while a bomb's ticking down to zero. It's the cage fighting equivalent of a police procedural: violent, gaudy, and packing heat. — Trent Jamieson

He figured somewhere in these territories there was an enormous madhouse whose keeper had thrown up his hands in disgusted defeat and flung wide the portals so these twisted folk could descend like locusts on the countryside. — William Gay

Somewhere in this process you will come face-to-face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. Your mind is a shrieking gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill utterly out of control and hopeless. No problem. You are not crazier than you were yesterday. It has always been this way and you just never noticed. You are also no crazier than everybody else around you. The only real difference is that you have confronted the situation they have not. — Henepola Gunaratana

There is a school of thought, a heresy from the madhouse of heresies in the ninth century, that says God is good and is in control of every individual thing that happens, every event, but that unfortunately the devil is in control of the timing. — Norman Rush

Oh Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia - what could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last. No longer can a fool point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, 'Somebody up there likes me.' And no longer can a tyrant say, 'God wants this or that to happen, and anyone who doesn't help this or that to happen is against God.' O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain! -The prayer of the Reverend C. Horner Redwine — Kurt Vonnegut

The madhouse is in a lot of places, not just a hospital, not just a palace, but also a pattern woven from threads so fine that no one can distinguish them, neither the Emperor nor the children, neither you nor I. — Einar Mar Gudmundsson

A madhouse of frenzied moneymaking and frenzied pleasure-seeking, with none of the corners chipped off. It is beautifully situatedand the air reminds one curiously of Edinburgh. — Aleister Crowley

You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there. — William Empson

England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases. — Leon Trotsky

The world is so full of simpletons and madmen, that one need not seek them in a madhouse. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Forgive yourself for being a human creature, Ramezay. That is the beginning of wisdom; that is part of what is meant by the fear of God; and for you it is the only way to save your sanity. Begin now, or you will end up with your saint in the madhouse. — Robertson Davies

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, of an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toilo. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us - who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would before an enthousiastic outbreak in a madhouse. — Joseph Conrad

Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse. — Oliver Heaviside

Have you ever thought that war is a madhouse and that everyone in the war is a patient? — Oriana Fallaci

When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people. — Thomas Szasz

There were orchids for sale, for one and two and three and five hundred dollars, a madhouse of orchids in every color, in every shape, with wide leaves and skinny leaves and no leaves at all, with fat jutting lips and lips cupped like thimbles, and with blackish-red hoods and freckles, with ruffles, with pleats, with corkscrew curls, big as fists, small as fingernails, smelling of honey, grass, citrus, cinnamon, or of nothing, not a smell at all but just the heavy warm quality that air has after it has been sitting in a flower. — Susan Orlean

It's a madhouse, of course. A complete, utter madhouse. I only hope to God it remains one. — Paul Bowles

Real meditation means: don't avoid the inner madhouse; enter into it, face it, encounter it, be watchful, because it is through watchfulness that you will overcome it. — Osho

If you live with unhealthy people, to be healthy is dangerous. If you live with insane people, then to be sane is dangerous. If you live in a madhouse, even if you are not mad at least pretend that you are mad; otherwise those mad people will kill you. — Osho

I sit here
drunk now.
I am
a series of
small victories
and large defeats
and I am as
amazed
as any other
that
I have gotten
from there to
here
without committing murder
or being
murdered;
without
having ended up in the
madhouse.

as I drink alone
again tonight
my soul despite all the past
agony
thanks all the gods
who were not
there
for me
then. — Charles Bukowski

At the moment, every country arrives at climate negotiations seeking to keep their own emissions as high as possible. This is the logic of the madhouse, a recipe for collective suicide. We dont want a global suicide pact. We want a global survival pact — Mohamed Nasheed

In modern life the world belongs to the stupid, the insensitive and the disturbed. The right to live and triumph is today earned with the same qualifications one requires to be interned in a madhouse: amorality, hypomania and an incapacity for thought. — Fernando Pessoa

The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall — Cormac McCarthy

The street to my left was backed up with traffic and I watched the people waiting patiently in the cars. There was almost always a man and a women, staring straight ahead, not talking. It was, finally, for everyone, a matter of waiting. You waited and you waited- for the hospital, the doctor, the plumber, the madhouse, the jail, papa death himself. First the signal red, then the signal was green. The citizens of the world ate food and watched t.v. and worried about their jobs or lack of the same, while they waited. — Charles Bukowski

Society is a madhouse whose wardens are the officials and the police. — August Strindberg

Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment
the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the wall down at the local madhouse. — Jasper Fforde

The girl had taken a few restless turns to and fro - closely watched meanwhile by her hidden observer - when the heavy bell of St. Paul's tolled for the death of another day. Midnight had come upon the crowded city. The palace, the night-cellar,* the jail, the madhouse: the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child: midnight was upon them all. — Charles Dickens

The world is a collective madhouse, its inhabitants are merely faking sanity. It is critical to becoming aware of these aberrations, for pretensions can be the enemy of love. — John Astin

One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one of a number of people to have suffered from this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about. — Michael Ende

I refuse to be. In
the madhouse of the inhuman
I refuse to live.
With the wolves of the market place
I refuse to howl ... — Marina Tsvetaeva

Females of domestic reputation lounged upon the balconies they passed with faces gotten up in indigo and almagre gaudy as the rumps of apes and they peered from behind their fans with a kind of lurid coyness like transvestites in a madhouse. — Cormac McCarthy

I could have been a superstar in America - I was certainly taken out there. But I said, 'No way, Jose, I'm not staying here in this madhouse.' — Charlotte Rampling

Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts. — George Santayana

If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse.
And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humored these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible. — Blaise Pascal

The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse. — Allen Ginsberg

But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it nasty. — G.K. Chesterton

Any one who thinks is an agnostic about something, otherwise he must believe that he is possessed of all knowledge. And the proper place for such a person is in the madhouse or the home for the feeble-minded. — Clarence Darrow

Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

That night, I dream. And when I wake up I remember watching a film with Nannan about a ventriloquist who went mad, his dummy coming to life and speaking for itself. My dream is like the end of the film where the ventriloquist and the dummy are in the madhouse, all these mad devil-faces pressed against the iron bars of the cell door, laughing as the dummy gets up off his chair and walks towards the ventriloquist who screams. The dummy strangles him. I can't remember in the dream if I was the ventriloquist or the dummy. I'm in a funny mood all day. I don't say much. I don't feel like it. — Dean Lilleyman

...As the evening wore on (the supper did not end until seven in the morning), the public were admitted to watch the festivities from the balustrade, and were offered biscuits and refreshments to keep them going through the night.
...One of the lawyers was so upset by the evening that he got up to leave, proclaiming: 'They will send you to the madhouse and strike you from the list of members of the Bar.' Grimod responded by locking the doors to the apartment and preventing any further guests from leaving. Coffee and liquers were taken in an adjoining room lit by 130 candles while the guests were entertained by a magic-lantern show and some experiments with electricity performed by the Italian physicist Castanio. M Rival tells us that many of the guests fell asleep. — Giles MacDonogh

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse. — Robert Musil

The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. — Ernest Becker

The only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted, I saw in a vision would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be "supervised." — Jack Kerouac

I want to be taken to a madhouse," said Turnbull distinctly, giving the direction with a sort of precision. "I want to go back to exactly the same lunatic asylum from which I came." "Why?" asked the unknown. "Because I want a little sane and wholesome society," answered Turnbull. — G.K. Chesterton

The United States is a madhouse. — Gore Vidal