Passages about madness and the irrational

Dionysus opens the play by naming himself, saying he has come to Thebes disguised as a man because his mother's sisters denied that Zeus fathered him and called her death a punishment for a lie.

Tiresias tells Pentheus that the new god gives wine, which relieves men of pain and gives them sleep, and that a city gains nothing by fighting a power it cannot see.

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.

Sancho points out that the giants are windmills, and Quixote answers that the enchanter Freston turned them into windmills to rob him of the glory of the victory.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

The country places and the trees won't teach me anything, but the people in the city do.

The greatest of goods come to us through madness, provided the madness is given by divine gift.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.

I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself / And falls on th' other.

Pylades, what shall I do? Am I to feel shame at killing my mother?

Have pity, child, on this breast, where many times you drowsed and sucked the milk that made you.

What part of life is not sorrowful and unpleasant, dull, insipid and troublesome, unless you add pleasure to it, that is to say, a seasoning of folly?

Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part?

Call me Ishmael.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

It was unearthly, and the men were. No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it, this suspicion of their not being inhuman.

The ego is not master in its own house.

A dream is a disguised fulfilment of a suppressed or repressed wish.

If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.

She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, / Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought, / And with a green and yellow melancholy / She sat like patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief.

I didn't kill a human being, I killed a principle.

An extraordinary man has the right, that is, not an official right, but an inner right, to decide in his own conscience to overstep certain obstacles.

I often think I have only one talent in the world, and that is a talent for boring myself to death.

For once in my life I want to have power over a human destiny.

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish.

Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.

The patient herself, who at this period of her illness strangely enough spoke and understood only English, gave this procedure the name of the talking cure.

April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.

Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.

Socrates meets Ion, a professional reciter of Homer fresh from winning a prize, and asks how he can speak so well about Homer and not about other poets, a puzzle Ion cannot answer since genuine expertise should ordinarily transfer across a subject's various instances.

Socrates suggests that rhapsode and poet alike work not by knowledge or skill but by divine possession, passed down like the pull of a magnet through a chain of iron rings, offering antiquity's most memorable model of inspiration as external force moving through passive conduits.

Two sets of identical twins, both pairs separated as infants in a shipwreck, end up in the same city of Ephesus on the same day without knowing it, doubling the confusion beyond Shakespeare's classical Roman source's single pair of twins.

Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio are mistaken at every turn for their local twins, who are also called Antipholus and Dromio, entangling wives, merchants, a courtesan and a goldsmith in escalating confusion throughout the city.

Hermia, ordered by her father to marry Demetrius, runs into the woods outside Athens with Lysander, followed by Demetrius and by Helena, who loves him, establishing the tangled romantic pursuit the woods' magic will further complicate.

Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, are quarrelling over a changeling boy, and Oberon's servant Puck misapplies a love potion, the lovers' affections tangle, and the weaver Bottom is given an ass's head and Titania's love.

Leontes, king of Sicilia, suddenly convinces himself that his pregnant wife Hermione has been unfaithful with his friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia, staging jealousy as genuinely irrational psychological eruption rather than response to actual evidence.

He imprisons Hermione, has the newborn daughter abandoned on the Bohemian coast, and learns from the oracle that he was wrong just as his son and, apparently, his wife die, one man's delusion inflicting cascading harm across his entire family.

The narrative allegorizes the Roman, Anglican and dissenting churches as three brothers, Peter, Martin and Jack, who twist their father's will to justify altering the coats he left them.

The brothers' story is repeatedly interrupted by digressions in the voice of a modern hack writer, on critics, on madness, on digressions themselves, that parody the pedantry and self-importance of contemporary authors.

Rasselas grows restless in the Happy Valley, an enclosed paradise where the royal children of Abyssinia are kept in engineered luxury specifically to prevent any restlessness, and finds that this manufactured contentment produces not happiness but a specific, gnawing dissatisfaction he cannot suppress or explain away.

Rasselas escapes with his sister Nekayah, her maid Pekuah, and the poet Imlac, and the group undertakes a systematic examination of different ways of living, the rich, the pastoral life, the hermit's withdrawal, and the reasoning philosopher, testing each option directly through observation rather than abstract argument alone.

He holds him with his glittering eye, the wedding guest stood still, and listens like a three years' child, the mariner hath his will.

Instead of the cross, the albatross about my neck was hung.

Lamb argues that acting reduces Hamlet's inward, constantly qualifying thought to definite physical gesture and vocal delivery, foreclosing the interpretive openness a reader's own imagination can sustain indefinitely when encountering the same language on the page rather than embodied by a specific actor.

Lamb contends that Lear's storm and his descent into madness cannot be adequately represented onstage without becoming either painful to watch or genuinely absurd, since the physical spectacle of staged madness risks undermining the sublime terror the same material achieves when read privately in the mind.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree, where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.

A savage place! as holy and enchanted as e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon-lover!

The Raven, Poe's best known poem, follows a bereaved scholar who questions a bird that answers only Nevermore, the poem's entire structure subordinated to building toward this single repeated word as its unified, devastating emotional effect.

Annabel Lee, Ulalume and Lenore, elegies for dead women, work out Poe's conviction that the death of a beautiful woman was poetry's most poetic subject, testing this claim across multiple formal variations rather than treating it as mere morbid fixation.

Myshkin arrives in Petersburg from years in a Swiss clinic for his epilepsy, and his immediate, unguarded honesty with strangers on the train, discussing his own illness and his own nature without any of the usual social concealment, establishes from the novel's opening pages exactly how out of step his candor is with ordinary social performance.

Nastasya Filippovna, treated for years as a possession bought and sold among wealthy men who competed over her, throws a large sum of money offered for her hand directly into the fire in front of assembled guests, a gesture of self-destructive defiance the novel presents as her clearest assertion of dignity against her own commodification.

Breuer and Freud's joint preliminary communication of 1893 states that hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences, proposing that hysterical symptoms represent the transformed, physically expressed residue of memories too emotionally intolerable to remain in ordinary conscious awareness.

The case of Anna O., treated by Breuer rather than Freud directly, describes a patient who herself named the treatment the talking cure, working through each individual symptom by tracing it back to its original precipitating memory and putting that memory into words under a kind of induced hypnotic concentration.

Religion, for the purposes of the lectures, means the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

The healthy-minded refuse to see evil and live in the sunshine; the sick soul cannot look away from it, and James, drawing on Tolstoy and Bunyan and a case he later admitted was his own, judges the sick soul's view the more complete.

In an Austrian village in 1590 three boys meet a beautiful youth who calls himself Satan, nephew of the fallen angel, who makes a tiny castle and its people out of clay and then crushes them when they annoy him.

Satan shows the boys the wretchedness of human life, the cruelty of the moral sense, which alone makes it possible to choose wrong, and the meaninglessness of any human choice, each life a chain fixed by its first link.

Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated and disciplined German writer whose entire career rests on decades of rigorous self-control, is seized by a sudden, uncharacteristic urge to travel, a break from his established pattern that sets the entire subsequent narrative in motion.

At the Lido hotel, Aschenbach becomes fascinated by Tadzio, a beautiful Polish boy of about fourteen, an obsession he never acts on directly, never approaching or speaking to the boy, yet one that escalates with unflinching psychological precision across the narrative's remaining length.

Freud proposes that narcissism, the investment of libido in one's own ego, is not itself a perversion but the libidinal complement to the instinct of self-preservation, a normal and universal stage every person passes through in the course of ordinary development rather than an inherently pathological deviation.

He distinguishes anaclitic love, in which a person loves someone who resembles a figure who once nourished, protected or cared for them, from narcissistic love, in which a person loves what they themselves are, what they once were, what they would like to be, or someone who was once part of themselves, arguing that most actual love combines elements of both types.

Freud observes that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out, reproducing it not as a memory but as an action, repeating it without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.

He identifies transference, the patient's relationship to the analyst himself, as the primary field in which this repetition actually plays out, arguing that the analyst must allow the patient's repressed material to unfold within this relationship rather than attempting to short-circuit the process through direct explanation alone.

Freud argues that the assumption of unconscious mental processes is both necessary and legitimate, necessary because conscious data alone leaves considerable gaps in the ordinary connections between mental events, and legitimate because this assumption proceeds by essentially the same inferential logic used throughout the physical sciences to infer unobservable causes from their observed effects.

He distinguishes the merely descriptive sense of unconscious, referring simply to whatever mental content happens not to be conscious at a given moment, from the dynamic sense, referring specifically to material actively repressed and kept from consciousness by ongoing psychical force, and from the systematic sense, referring to an entire distinct region of the mind operating by its own characteristic rules.

Boni and Liveright's American edition of Riviere's translation, published in 1920, carried the title A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, a marketing and editorial choice distinct from the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis title used for the same translation in Britain.

Joan Riviere had herself undergone analysis with Freud before undertaking this translation, giving her rendering of his technical vocabulary and his characteristic lecturing voice an unusually direct, practitioner's familiarity most literary translators approaching psychoanalytic material from outside the field would not have possessed.

Freud observes that in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty, while in melancholia it is the ego itself that has become so, a distinction he treats as the single most important clue to what actually distinguishes normal grief from pathological depression.

He proposes that the melancholic has unconsciously identified with the lost object, so completely that the ego itself comes to stand in for what has been lost, and that the reproaches and hostility originally directed at the lost object are consequently turned against the ego instead, producing the melancholic's characteristic self-accusation and self-hatred.

A theatre company is rehearsing when six people interrupt and announce that they are characters from an unfinished play, abandoned by the author who imagined them, and that they need someone to put their story on stage, since no author has completed them.

The actors try to perform what the characters describe and get it wrong, the characters object that no actor can be them, dramatizing an unbridgeable gap between lived experience and its theatrical representation that skilled acting cannot actually close.

Freud states directly that anxiety is not, as he had previously believed, a direct transformation of dammed-up libido, but is instead a signal produced by the ego itself in response to a perceived situation of danger, reversing the causal direction his earlier theory had assumed between repression and anxiety.

He carefully distinguishes inhibitions, a simple restriction of a normal ego function undertaken as a precaution, from symptoms, which indicate that a repressed process has partially succeeded in breaking through the ego's defenses, treating these as genuinely distinct phenomena rather than simply different degrees of the same underlying process.

The story opens by stating that when Miss Emily Grierson died, the whole town went to her funeral, the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant had entered in at least ten years.

After her father's death, Emily refuses for three days to acknowledge that he has actually died, and the town, rather than intervening more forcefully, allows this refusal to pass without serious challenge, an early instance of the same pattern of denial that will recur, far more devastatingly, later in her life.

Brigadier General Ezra Mannon returns to his wife Christine, who has taken his cousin Adam Brant as a lover, and she poisons him, transposing the opening murder of Aeschylus's Oresteia into a New England setting at the Civil War's end.

Their daughter Lavinia, who loves her father and hates her mother, drives her brother Orin to kill Brant, adapting Electra's role into specifically psychological terms, family violence now explained through repressed desire rather than divine compulsion.

Jung describes the psyche's basic structure, including the four functions of thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition, and the complementary attitudes of introversion and extraversion, building a systematic typology of individual psychological difference before turning to his more contested claims about the unconscious.

Jung distinguishes the personal unconscious, built from an individual's own repressed or forgotten experience, from a deeper collective unconscious populated by archetypes, inherited psychic patterns he argues are shared across all humanity rather than accumulated through any single person's personal history.

Ordinary objects begin to unsettle Roquentin: a pebble on the beach, a glass of beer, his own hand, staging existence's gratuitous character as a genuinely visceral bodily experience rather than only abstract philosophical proposition he merely contemplates.

Roquentin gives up the biography and quarrels with a self-taught humanist who has read the library in alphabetical order, satirizing a specific false consolation, imposing arbitrary external order onto knowledge as substitute for confronting existence directly.

The narrator, expelled from his Black college after inadvertently showing a visiting white trustee the wrong side of town, receives letters of reference intended to help him find work in New York, only to discover much later that the letters actually instruct their recipients to keep running him rather than ever actually help him.

At the Liberty Paints factory, whose signature product, Optic White, is advertised with the slogan Keep America Pure White, the narrator nearly dies in an industrial accident, an episode whose irony, a Black worker nearly killed producing a product literally named for racial purity, the novel makes impossible to miss.

Fanon argues that colonialism is not a thinking machine or a body endowed with reasoning faculties, but violence in its natural state, and concludes that it will only yield when confronted with greater violence, a claim he presents as description of colonialism's actual structure rather than as abstract moral endorsement of force.

He warns that the national bourgeoisie which inherits a newly independent state will, in country after country, simply step into the colonizer's vacated economic and administrative position rather than genuinely transforming the structures of exploitation that position depended on, betraying the actual substance of the independence it claims to represent.