• “Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us - and those around us - more effectively. Look for the learning.” ~ Louisa May Alcott
• “Conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty.” ~ Louisa May Alcott
• “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” ~ Aristotle
• “There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.” ~ Antonin Artaud
• “What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.” ~ Pedro Calderson de la Barca
• “Love that is not madness is not love.” ~ Pedro Calderson de la Barca
• “The expectation of an unpleasantness is more terrible than the thing itself.” ~ Marie Bashkirtseff
• “Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.” ~ Charles Bukowski
• “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.” ~ William S. Burroughs
• “A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.” ~ Albert Camus
• “To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
• “Literature has been the salvation of the damned, literature has inspired and guided lovers, routed despair and can perhaps in this case save the world.” ~ John Cheever
• “A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.” ~ Winston Churchill
• “The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.” ~ Jean Cocteau
• “You are someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that in my view is a serious illness. God chose you to be different. Why are you disappointing God with this kind of attitude?” ~ Paulo Coelho
• “Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.” ~ Robertson Davies
• “Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.” ~ Robertson Davies
• “A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.” ~ Robertson Davies
• “Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.” ~ Robertson Davies
• “I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.” ~ Rene Descartes
• “I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.” ~ Erasmus
• “Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.” ~ Loren Eiseley
• “We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.” ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti
• “I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.” ~ Ernest J. Gaines
• “Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.” ~ Allen Ginsberg
• “Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.” ~ Robert Graves
• “Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
• “Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.” ~ Seamus Heaney
• “History, is a conscious, self-meditating process — Spirit emptied out into Time.” ~ G. W. F. Hegel
• “The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” ~ G. W. F. Hegel
• “Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” ~ Heinrich Heine
• “A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.”~ Robert Heinlein
• “One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.” ~ Robert Heinlein
• “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.” ~ Lillian Hellman, Letter to the US House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities, 1952
• “Oh, believe me. The greatest egos are those which are too egotistical to show just how egotistical they are.” ~ William M. Inge, Bus Stop
• “Worry is interest paid on a trouble before it is due.” ~ William R. Inge
• “How sick one gets of being ‘good,’ how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.” ~ Alice James
• “If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick.” ~ Ben Jonson
• “The difference between mad people and sane people... is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.” ~ Maxine Hong Kingston
• “Old age is not a disease - it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.” ~ Maggie Kuhn
• “A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.” ~ Alphonse de Lamartine
• “Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”~ Harper Lee
• “What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”~ Ursula Le Guin
• “Our truest responsibility to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find the truth.” ~ Madeleine L'Engle
• “Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.” ~ Walter Lippmann
• “Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.” ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay
• “Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.” ~ Norman Mailer
• “No medicine cures what happiness cannot.” ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• “Men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed-off wings where he never ventures.” ~ Francois Mauriac
• “A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.” ~ H. L. Mencken
• “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.” ~ Thomas Merton
• “The unconscious in us warns us that in art we have to follow one particular path. And if we follow it, it is not the sign of an unconscious act. On the contrary, it shows that there is in our ordinary consciousness a greater awareness of our unconsciousness.” ~ Piet Mondrian
• “The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.” ~ Christopher Morley
• “The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.” ~ Lewis Mumford
• “By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.” ~ Lewis Mumford
• “War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.” ~ Lewis Mumford
• “Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
• “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
• “Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness.” ~ Anais Nin
• “In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made.” ~ Kathleen Norris
• “Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.” ~ Blaise Pascal
• “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.” ~ Sylvia Plath
• “The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.” ~ Plato
• “It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.” ~ Adrienne Rich
• “Every one, more or less, loves Power, yet those who most wish for it are seldom the fittest to be trusted with it.” ~ Samuel Richardson
• “Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
• “The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one – and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! ....So the poet is actually a thief of Fire!” ~ Arthur Rimbaud
• “I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man's basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny.” ~ Mark Rothko
• “I have loved to the point of madness, that which is called madness, that which to me is the only sensible way to love.” ~ Francoise Sagan
• “Depression is rage spread thin.” ~ George Santayana
• “Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.” ~ Mary Shelley
• “The poet is a madman lost in adventure.” ~ Paul Verlaine
• “Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.”~ Voltaire
• “The borderline between normal and schizophrenic people is broad and nearly imperceptible.” ~ E. O. Wilson
• “Wellbeing is attained by little and little, and nevertheless is no little thing itself.” ~ Zeno of Citium
• “Tis better to plumb the depths of unity than forever scratch the surface of variety.” ~ Emile Zola

FYI - America's Founding Father Patrick Henry first wife Sarah became mentally ill around 1771. The local doctor and his friends advocated her being locked up in a cell at the public hospital in Williamsburg. Henry, appalled by the windowless brick cell with nothing more than a straw mattress and chamber pot, prepared a private, two-room apartment for her in the basement of their home. He personally cared for her till the end of her life in 1775. She was denied burial in the churchyard because she was possessed by the devil and Henry buried her close to their home and planted a lilac bush beside the grave. ... Brings a deeper appreciation to “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!”.