The madness of the heart. [ Byron ]
Anger is a short madness. [ Horace ]
What madness has seized you? [ Virgil ]
To be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain. [ Coleridge ]
Great solitude is a sort of madness. [ Proverb ]
Be wise today; 'tis madness to defer. [ Young ]
Like madness is the glory of this life. [ William Shakespeare ]
A madman is punished by his own madness. [ Law ]
A fixed idea ends in madness or heroism. [ Victor Hugo ]
Great wits to madness nearly are allied;
Both serve to make our poverty our pride. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide. [ John Dryden ]
Be wise to-day! 'tis madness to defer;
Next day, the fatal precedent will plead;
Thus on, till wisdom is pushed out of life.
Procrastination is the thief of time. [ Edward Young ]
A man of gladness seldom falls into madness. [ Proverb ]
Unprovoked and calm
You reason well, see as you ought to see,
And wonder at the madness of mankind:
Seized with the common rage, you soon forget
The speculations of your wiser hours. [ Armstrong ]
Love and madness judge of things much alike. [ Proverb ]
Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness. [ Seneca ]
Luck, mere luck, may make even madness wisdom. [ Douglas Jerrold ]
Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vex'd, a sea nourish'd with lovers' tears:
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet. [ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet ]
A daring pilot in extremity;
Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high
He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide; [ Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel ]
A mere madness to live like a wretch and die rich. [ Burton ]
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. [ Aristotle ]
It is madness to put on gloves when you are stark naked. [ Proverb ]
It is a madness for a sheep to send a challenge to a wolf. [ Proverb ]
It is a madness for a sheep to treat of peace with a wolf. [ Proverb ]
There is no great genius free from some tincture of madness. [ Seneca ]
If madness were pain, you would hear outcries in every house. [ Proverb ]
Books have brought some men to knowledge, and some to madness. [ Petrarch ]
It is unmistakable madness to live in poverty only to die rich. [ Juvenal ]
This I ask, is it not madness to kill thyself in order to escape death! [ Martial ]
To me avarice seems not so much a vice as a deplorable piece of madness. [ Sir Thomas Browne ]
Orators inflame the people, whose anger is really but a short fit of madness. [ Swift ]
Lust yielded to is a pleasant madness, but it is a desperate madness when opposed. [ Bp. Hall ]
Love is merely a madness, and .... deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do. [ William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act III. Sc. 2 ]
Excess of grief for the deceased is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not. [ Xenophon ]
Madness is the last stage of human debasement. It is the abdication of humanity. Better to die a thousand times! [ Napoleon ]
It is a madness to make fortune the mistress of events, because in herself she is nothing, but is ruled by prudence. [ Dryden ]
It is strange that all great men should have some little grain of madness mingled with whatever genius they possess. [ Moliere ]
Be wise today; 'tis madness to defer; Next day the fatal precedent will plead; Thus on, till wisdom is push'd out of life. [ Young ]
There is nothing so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it in expecting evil before it arrives? [ Seneca ]
Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools. [ Burke ]
Perfection does not exist. To understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; to desire to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness. [ Alfred de Musset ]
Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to commonsense, and in lending one's self to the universal delusion without becoming its dupe. [ Amiel ]
It is through madness that we hate an enemy, and think of revenging ourselves; and it is through indolence that we are appeased, and do not revenge ourselves. [ Bruyere ]
Madness is consistent, which is more than can be said for poor reason. Our passions and principles are steady in frenzy, but begin to shift and waver as we return to reason. [ Sterne ]
Wise men mingle mirth with their cares, as a help either to forget or overcome them; but to resort to intoxication for the ease of one's mind is to cure melancholy by madness. [ Charron ]
If you're ever stuck in some thick undergrowth, in your underwear, don't stop and think of what other words have 'under' in them, because that's probably the first sign of jungle madness. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
God has sometimes converted wickedness into madness; and it is to the credit of human reason that men who are not in some degree mad are never capable of being in the highest degree wicked. [ Burke ]
I am constitutionally susceptible of noises; a carpenter's hammer, in a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness; but those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of music. [ C. Lamb ]
Despair is like forward children, who, when you take away one of their playthings, throw the rest into the fire for madness. It grows angry with itself, turns its own executioner, and revenges its misfortunes on its own head. [ Charron ]
Fame is a revenue payable only to our ghosts; and to deny ourselves all present satisfaction, or to expose ourselves to so much hazard for this, were as great madness as to starve ourselves, or fight desperately for food, to be laid on our tombs after our death. [ Mackenzie ]
The blindness of bigotry, the madness of ambition, and the miscalculations of diplomacy seek their victims principally amongst the innocent and the unoffending. The cottage is sure to suffer for every error of the court, the cabinet, or the camp. When error sits in the seat of power and of authority, and is generated in high places, it may be compared to that torrent which originates indeed in the mountain, but commits its devastation in the vale. [ Colton ]