QUOTES to include/use

“The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact.” - Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

'Highly intelligent and educated people have written arguments against treating such people, saying they need to be “free” to create. Madness, sickness, is romanticized as a muse. I have seen the reality. There is no freedom in mental illness or addiction. There is only deterioration, extreme emotional pain and, often, premature death. I have seen brilliant people go off medication and commit suicide, relapse in addiction and lose everything, including life. There is nothing romantic about it. It is only a sad, futile loss.' - Paul A. Hood, MS, LPC
http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/creativity_and_madness


'Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence-whether much that is glorious-whether all that is profound-does not spring from disease of thought-from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey vision they obtain glimpses of eternity.... They penetrate, however rudderless or compassless, into the vast ocean of the "light affable."' (Edgar Allan Poe, cited in Galloway, 1986, p. 243)

"No great genius was without a mixture of insanity" (Aristotle)


"Everything great in the world is created by neurotics. They have composed our masterpieces, but we don't consider what they have cost their creators in sleepless nights, and worst of all, fear of death." (Marcel Proust)

"Poetry led me by the hand out of madness" (Anne Sexton)

EXPLANATION FOR BIPOLAR BEING A DRIVING FORCE IN CREATIVITY (Healthy or not): "The expansive quality of the mood is characterized by unceasing and indiscriminate enthusiasm for interpersonal, sexual, or occupational interactions" (APA, 1994, p. 328).

"There is thus a thin but definite borderline between the most advanced and healthy type of thinking - creative thinking - and the most impoverished and pathological types of thinking - psychotic processes" (Albert Rothenberg)


"Two aspects of thinking in particular are pronounced in both creative and hypomanic thought: fluency, rapidity, and flexibility of thought on the one hand, and the ability to combine ideas or categories of thought in order to form new and original connections on the other" (Kay Jamison, 1993, p. 105).

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it..., but mostly you need ordeal...My idea is this: The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business. Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. (John Berryman, Poet)