Luciana’s Reviews > History of Madness > Status Update

“There was a degree of obviousness about the [mad being], an immediate assessment of [their] features, which seems correlative to the non-determination of madness itself. The less precise madness was, the easier the mad were to recognize.”

“Paradoxically, having no unmistakeable signs nor positive presence, it presented itself with a sort of calm immediacy, on the surface of the world, with no possible distance for doubt. Only it did not offer itself then as madness but rather as a recognizable type, as the other mad [being].”

Madness is “present everywhere, but never in that which made it what it is”.

“Madness is the side of order that goes unperceived, which ensures that [human], despite [their Self], is the instrument of a wisdom whose end he does not understand. Madness measures the distance that exists between foresight and providence, between calculation and finality.”

“everything that nature does not obtain from our reason, it obtains through our madness”

“There is in madness an essential aptitude for mimicking reason, which in the end masks its own unreasonable content; or rather, the wisdom of nature is so profound that it manages to use madness as another path for reason, making it a short-cut to wisdom, avoiding its own forms with an invisible prescience”.

“The earth was not to blame for that sterility into which it would fall if [human] remained idle: the earth has not sinned, and if she is cursed, it is on account of the fallen [humans] who work to render her plentiful”

“madness is banished in the name of the [one] who doubts, and who is no more capable of opening [their Self] to unreason than [one] is of not thinking or not being.”

“Reason has taught me that if you condemn in this way anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible, you are claiming to know the frontier and bounds of the will of God and the power of Nature our Mother; it taught me also that there is nothing in the whole world madder than bringing matters down to the measure of our own capacities and potentialities.”