It is madness to attempt to hold. In the first place the troops cannot do it and in the second place if they do not retreat they will be destroyed. I repeat that this order be rescinded or that you find someone else.
Gerd von Rundstedt

It is madness to make fortune the mistress of events, because by herself she is nothing and is ruled by prudence.
John Dryden

It seems to me madness to wake up in the morning and do something other than paint, considering that one may not wake up the following morning.
Frank Auerbach

It's a kind of madness in cosmopolitan cities now.
Sean Connery

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Jealousy lives upon doubts. It becomes madness or ceases entirely as soon as we pass from doubt to certainty.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Love that is not madness is not love.
Pedro Calderon de la Barca

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
Michel Foucault

Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
Henry Miller

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R. D. Laing

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
Blaise Pascal

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.
David Herbert Lawrence

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
Aristotle

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.
Aristotle

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty; only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther - the machine-gun is covering the square.
Erich Maria Remarque

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
Andre Gide

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.
Voltaire

Our constancy, same might call it our madness, was necessary to wear down the oppressive forces of the old democracy which, in Spain, was a hundred years behind the times.
Frederica Montseny