Madness And Creativity Quotes & Sayings

Why had he never appreciated what a miracle he was, brain and nerve and bounding heart? It would all be gone ... or at least, he would be gone from it. — Anonymous

He is a great enough magician to tap our most common nightmares, daydreams and twilight fancies, but he never invented them either: he found them a place to live, a green alternative to each day's madness here in a poisoned world. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. — Peter S. Beagle

I have never seen genius without a touch of madness ... and vice versa. — Lance Conrad

Fools write books about madness being an elevated mental state or an alternative form of creativity. It's not, it's anguish. — Jonathan Kellerman

So I'm at the wailing wall, standing there like a moron, with my harpoon. — Emo Philips

Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression. Why are more creative people prone to madness? They have more than average amounts of energies and abilities to see things in a fresh and original way - then because they also have depression, I think they're more in touch with human suffering. — Nick Flynn

I love Columbia, Missouri, if it wasn't for the authorities, I'd go back. — Bill Ferguson

Does madness bring creativity? Or does creativity cause madness? Can an artist create without the ups so high and the downs so low? — Megan Hart

I'm a classic eccentric, living at the extremes of high mania and low mood. There's no middle ground, only madness and sadness. — Fennel Hudson

There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads. — Ransom Riggs

One of the tutors let it slip when we were talking about the difference between revelation, inspiration, creativity and madness. How can we know which is which? — James Runcie

I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration. — Arthur Holitscher

Human values can be listed as 50, 60, 70, 80 in all. But they can be better grouped under the following three heads; pure thoughts, pure words, pure deed; thoughts, words and deed cordinated with one another. — Sathya Sai Baba

Creativity is on the side of health - it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness. — Jeanette Winterson

I always have music. I love it to be very upbeat. When you're having drinks, I like something like Cesaria Evora. During dinner, I like the much more traditional - old Frank Sinatra and things like that. — Ina Garten

It's redundant to die in Los Angeles. — Truman Capote

Government is not the generator of economic growth; working people are. — Phil Gramm

Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant king? O Fool, I shall go mad.
Maybe madness is the excess of possibility, ... And writingis about reducing possibility to ne idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud
and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don't harbour any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader. — Patricia Duncker

When I look like this into the blue sky, it seems so deep, so peaceful, so full of a mysterious tenderness, that I could lie for centuries and wait for the dawning of the face of God out of the awe-inspiring loving-kindness. — George MacDonald

I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough. — Aspen Matis

Threshold is where the madness ends and the magic begins. — Kamal Ravikant

Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.
from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius — Aberjhani

In the case of the creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude. You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely. — Friedrich Schiller

Apophenia means finding pattern or meaning where others don't. Feelings of revelation and ecstasies usually accompany it. It has some negative connotations in psychological terminology when it implies finding meaning or pattern where none exists; and some positive ones when it implies finding something important, useful or beautiful. It thus links creativity and psychosis, genius and madness. — Peter J. Carroll

Creativity is not being afraid to be different. It takes madness to jump at an idea that no one else believes in. — Barbara Januszkiewicz

I AM come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence
whether much that is glorious
whether all that is profound
does not spring from disease of thought
from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable", and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, "agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi".
We will say then, that I am mad. — Edgar Allan Poe

Last night, I was a mad man searching for a whiff of your fragrance. The stars and the moon even laughed at me. — Avijeet Das

Germany had the misfortune of becoming poisoned, first because of plenty, and then because of want. — Albert Einstein

To gauge the understanding and insight that metaphysics provides is to ask whether, in the final analysis, it helps us to cope with our world and harmonize our existence with nature, humanity, and ourselves, and leads to greater freedom and self-realization. Metaphysics is only the beginning. The end is human progress. — Rudolph Rummel

To be creative is to look Madness in the eye and challenge it to a spitting contest. — River Fairchild

I watched him carefully. He was making art because he has to, and because he's brave enough to try and make contact, right there on the edge of madness, where he dreams. — Anne Lamott

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls. — Aberjhani

If my body was cold in the night mist, I didn't feel it. If the sea roared in my ears, I didn't hear it. If the rock I sat on was sharp and jagged, I hardly noticed. Everything outside the two of us was a distraction. — Ransom Riggs

Elderly people are like plants. Whereas some go to seed, or to pot, others blossom in the most wonderful ways. I believe beauty competitions should be held only for people over seventy years of age. When we are young, we have the face and figure God gave us. We did nothing to earn our good looks. But as we get older, character becomes etched on our face. Beautiful old people are works of art. Like a white candle in a holy place, so it the beauty of an aged face. — James Simpson

A lot of my idealism was frustrated by the end of the '60s because of the way things went with the assassinations and the sense that the political establishment was so fixed in its ways you couldn't change anything. — David Talbot