We are all born mad. Some remain so.

Were truer words ever spoken? Children always want to test the rules, to see how far they can go without being punished. Then you have the older ones who kill and steal and see how long they can avoid the law.

Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

We are born. We die. We are born. We die. Ad infinatum. Ad nauseam. What are we doing here? Why? Maybe there isn't a reason. Personally I would not be surprised. Sometimes it's the people who insist there is one, and who claim to know for certain that they know what it is, who are the most fanatical. Irony is so delicious.

There is no creativity without madness.

Heightened sensitivity. Open to all the colours and noises of the Universe. Indeed if one was not born mad one like this would certainly become so. No great genius without a touch of madness. Is it not so? I knew one like that. An artistic genius and he cut his own ear off with a knife.

You need to have a little bit of madness, or you will never dare to cut the rope and be free.

Courage is the most beautiful form of madness, is it not? To conquer one's fear is to conquer one's reason; to conquer one's reason is to be truly free, for what greater freedom exists than the separation of ourselves from the chains of the reasonable mind? From our own rules?

Many of us are all given but a little spark of madness. We must not lose it. To be without madness is to be without mind. For one to live not the slightest bit mad, one must discover how to live as a stone. And even then one has a compulsion. A madness that seeks the ground.

Many wonder why I am here.

Why am I here? I am surely not mad. He rules, but I do all the work. I set things in pattern. It is not right to call it setting things in order. I do not love the song of bones. I do not probe the secrets of pain. Insofar as one may tell I am no poet or artisan.

Then why am I here? In truth I am the maddest. Did you know I was the first one? I have been here a long time.

Shall I tell you a secret?

Many people think madness is separation from reason. It is not proper to call it a loss of it. The secret is that this is not the only way.

The truly mad man is the one who has lost everything but his reason.

I tried to be separate and not be mad. I became completely so. Now I serve as an example. To show all that it is pointless. That there is no escape.

All are born mad. Some remain so. All are, in the very end. For if death is the loss of the mind, what is madness

Haskill