There's no difference between a madman and a professor...it should be clear to you in the way they dress, act and think.

The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!

To say a man does mad things because he is mad is merely unintelligent and stupid. A madman is as logical and reasoned in his action as a sane man — given his peculiar biased point of view. For example, if a man insists on going out and squatting about in nothing but a loin cloth his conduct seems eccentric in the extreme. But once you know that the man himself is firmly convinced that he is Mahatma Gandhi, then his conduct becomes perfectly reasonable and logical.

Hence it comes to pass, that a man, who is very sober, and of right understanding in all other things, may in one particular be as frantic, as any in Bedlam; if either by any sudden very strong impression, or long fixing his fancy upon one sort of thoughts, incoherent ideas have been cemented together so powerfully, as to remain united. But there are degrees of madness, as of folly; the disorderly jumbling ideas together, is in some more, and some less. In short, herein seems to lie the difference between idiots and madmen, That madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them: but idiots make very few or no propositions, and reason scarce at all.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason

Though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked.

"Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person."

All men are mad in some way or another, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God's madmen too, the rest of the world.

A madman's ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

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

Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.