A Quote by Yann Martel

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.

Yann Martel

Quote Topics

Ability Ability To Adapt Adapt Contain Inexplicable Living Living Thing Living Things Madness Measure Moves Parcel Part Part And Parcel Saving Sometimes Species Strange Survive Them Things Ways Without Would

Quote Author

Yann Martel
Canadian - Author
Born: June 25, 1963

I think the big danger of madness is not madness itself, but the habit of madness. What I discovered during the time I spent in the asylum is that I could choose madness and spend my whole life without working, doing nothing, pretending to be mad. It was a very strong temptation.

Paulo Coelho

In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too

Saul Bellow

Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings... the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art... So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense... madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.

Plato

People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.

Javier Marías

In the Renaissance, madness was present everywhere and mingled with every experience by its images or its dangers. During the classical period, madness was shown, but on the other side of bars; if present, it was at a distance, under the eyes of a reason that no longer felt any relation to it and that would not compromise itself by too close a resemblance. Madness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since been suppressed.

Michel Foucault

The greatest part of mankind labor under one delirium or another; and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in madness, but the species of it. The covetous, the prodigal, the superstitious, the libertine, and the coffee-house politician, are all Quixotes in their several ways.

Henry Fielding

Each sex has a relation to madness. Every desire has a relation to madness. But it would seem that one desire has been taken as wisdom, moderation, truth, leaving to the other sex the weight of a madness that cannot be acknowledged or accommodated.

Luce Irigaray

Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction - it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.

Brian Aldiss

From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is not "true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves.

R. D. Laing

Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness? - The Joker

Grant Morrison

I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness - the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.

Edgar Allan Poe

As an actor, you have to have trust and believe that somebody is taking care of you or watching your back. With a part like this, especially with where we're going with it, I can't pull any punches. I can't do it halfway, especially when you're dealing with madness and this descent into madness.

Jessica Lange

The constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence.

Michel Foucault

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical may be madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness ...Maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Miguel de Cervantes

Here at CBS, spring also means March Madness. I love the name March Madness. I'm glad the PC police haven't made us change March Madness to early spring psychosis.