Insanity And Sanity Quotes

The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad. ~ Diogenes

Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone. ~ Baltasar Gracian

Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles ~ Mark Twain

Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking. ~ Ayn Rand

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane. ~ Mark Twain

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. ~ George Orwell

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world. ~ Sigmund Freud

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now. ~ Mark Twain

Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies? ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

What no one tells you is that when someone you love dies, you lose them twice. Once to death, the second time to acceptance, and you don't walk that long, dark passage between the two alone. Grief takes every shuffling, unwilling step with you, offering a seductive bouquet of memories that can only blossom south of sanity. You can stay there, nose buried in the petals of the past. But you're never really alive again. ~ Karen Marie Moning

We believe that cowardice is to blame for the world's injustices. We believe that peace is hard-won, that sometimes it is necessary to fight for peace. But more than that: We believe that justice is more important than peace. We believe in freedom from fear, in denying fear the power to influence our decisions. We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another. We believe in acknowledging fear and the extent to which it rules us. We believe in facing that fear no matter what the cost to our comfort, our happiness, or even to our sanity. We believe in shouting for those who can only whisper, in defending those who cannot defend themselves. We believe, not in just bold words, but in bold deeds to match them. We believe that pain and death are better than cowardice and inaction because we believe in action. We do not believe in living comfortable lives. We do not believe that silence is useful. We do not believe in good manners. We do not believe in empty heads, empty mouths, or empty hands. We do not believe that learning to master violence encourages unnecessary violence. We do not believe that we should be allowed to stand idly by. We do not believe that any other virtue is more important than bravery. ~ Veronica Roth

And then Harry Potter had launched in to a speech that was inspiring, yet vague. A speech to the effect that Fred and George and Lee had tremendous potential if they could just learn to be weirder. To make people's live surreal, instead of just surprising them with the equivalents of buckets of water propped above doors. (Fred and George had exchanged interested looks, they'd never thought of that one.) Harry Potter had invoked a picture of the prank they'd pulled on Neville - which, Harry had mentioned with some remorse, the Sorting Hat had chewed him out on - but which must have made Neville doubt his own sanity. For Neville it would have felt like being suddendly transported into an alternate universe. The same way everyone else had felt when they'd seen Snape apologize. That was the true power of pranking. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

A wisdom as constant as the North Star shines within all of us. It is always present. waiting to be tapped, waiting to guide us, to advise us. We need only use it to prevent its atrophy. No matter what our background, profession, color, or religion, employing this universal compass, this innate sense of what we know to be true, will help us establish a lifelong foundation - a place we go to recover our sanity and to regain our balance. ~ Nancy Cobb

When commenting on the turmoil and disorder of the world, If the other planets are inhabited, they must be using this earth as their insane asylum. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Brasi left the room. Two of his men assisted the midwife and the baby was born, the mother was exhausted and went into a deep sleep. Brasi was summoned and Filomena, who had wrapped the newborn child in an extra blanket, extended the bundle to him and said, "If you're the father, take her. My work is finished." Brasi glared at her, malevolent, insanity stamped on his face. "Yes, I'm the father," he said. "But I don't want any of that race to live. Take it down to the basement and throw it into the furnace. ~ Mario Puzo

People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

It wasn't love, not quite, but it was almost there and it was desperate and I didn't know how to put it into words. It was the back and forth of him, the hot and cold, it made me crazy, made me feel crazy, and sanity never felt more pointless than when I was with him. ~ Kristine Wyllys

Surely it is moderate to say that the dish-washing for a family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day's work, it takes, therefore, half a million able bodied persons
mostly women
to do the dish-washing of the country. And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work: that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper: of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children
for all of which things the community has naturally to pay. ~ Upton Sinclair

When you begin to believe you have license because you are a special person breathing special oxygen, that's when you're in big trouble. That's the road to insanity. And a lot of people in the studios are like that. They believe that they are special. I do think actors are blessed, or cursed, with maybe a slightly heightened awareness, which you have to use. ~ Anthony Hopkins

He was happy because, after such a long study, experimentation, and struggle, he could at last affirm the ultimate truth: there never were and never would be any madmen in Itaguai or anywhere else. ~ Machado De Assis

Between madness and sanity, there is a shifting boundary. It is impossible to explain. Time slows down and you have to try to fill it. You don't have anything but solitude. ~ Jose Mujica

I sit and I listen to John cry and I wish there was something I could do to help him. I sit and I listen and I wish there was some way I could make it better. There is no hope for John, no hope at all. He could go to five hundred Clinics and spend ten years working the Twelve Steps and it wouldn't make a bit of fucking difference. He has been broken beyond repair, wounded beyond the point of healing, abused beyond the point of recovery. He will never know happiness or joy, security, or normalcy. He will never know pleasure, satisfaction, serenity, clarity, peace of mind or any semblance of sanity. He will never know or trust love. You poor, sick, sad Motherfucker. You will never know. I'm sorry. ~ James Frey

Look deep within your soul and ask yourself - no matter who it concerns - is it worth it?
Is it worth losing your outer and inner peace?
Is it worth your happiness?
Is it worth your sanity?
If they are causing you stress; let them go and cut the cord.
The question that needs to be asked is - who do you love more? Yourself, or making other people happy? ~ Charlena E. Jackson

I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons. ~ Jonathan Michel Metzl

We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I'm well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on. ~ Mark Lawrence

Mental wounds not healing, who and what's to blame. I'm going off the rails on a crazy train. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of tho ~ G.K. Chesterton

The good part about having a mental disorder is having a valid reason for all the stupid things we do because of a damaged prefrontal cortex. However, the best part is seeing someone completely sane do the exact same things, without a valid excuse. This is the great equalizer of God and his little gift for all us crazy people to enjoy. ~ Shannon L. Alder

A civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war, where the able can prosper and honest beings can have rights, and where man is free to rise to greater heights, are the aims of Scientology. ~ L. Ron Hubbard

Men often have grievances against prominent and powerful persons. Historically, the grievances of the powerless against the powerful have furnished the steam for the engines of revolutions. My point is that in many of the famous medicolegal cases involving the issue of insanity, persons of relatively low social rank openly attacked their superiors. Perhaps their grievances were real and justified, and were vented on the contemporary social symbols of authority, the King and the Queen. Whether or not these grievances justified homicide is not our problem here. I merely wish to suggest that the issue of insanity may have been raised in these trials to obscure the social problems which the crimes intended to dramatize. ~ Thomas Szasz

The truth, though is that Cantor's work and its context are so totally interesting and beautiful that there's no need for breathless Prometheusizing of the poor guy's life. The real irony is that the view of (Infinity) as some forbidden zone or road to insanity-which view was very old and powerful and haunted math for 2000+ years- is precisely what Cantor's own work overturned. Saying that (Infinity) drove Cantor mad is sort of like mourning St. George's loss to the dragon: it's not only wrong but insulting. ~ David Foster Wallace

Hanging out with my girlfriends is my sanity saver. We go out for a bad chick flick and dinner. I suggest you break free from the guys, see a really silly, girly movie, and get a little something to eat afterwards. It feels like a treat. ~ Tamara Taylor

With that, I follow my little chem partner out of the room and down the hall.
"Stop following me," she snaps, looking over her shoulder to check how many people are watching us walk down the hall together.
As if I'm el diablo himself.
"Wear long sleeves on Saturday night," I tell her, knowing full well she's reaching the end of her sanity rope. I usually don't try to get under the skin of white chicks, but this one is fun to rattle. This one, the most popular and coveted one of all, actually cares. "It gets pretty cold on the back of my motorcycle. ~ Simone Elkeles

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one. ~ E.B. White

My sin murdered Him. And out of this self-loathing shame borne of the understanding that I could perpetrate such a heinous act, I am barely able to raise my head sufficiently to ask what crazed insanity would prompt Jesus to walk out of an empty tomb for the single purpose of pursuing a decaying soul that murdered Him? And I would be wise to consider that the question itself is asked only because I have yet to touch the barest periphery of God's love despite the fact that because of an empty tomb it stands right in front of me. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

WISDOM ISN'T ABOUT NOT MAKING MISTAKES BUT ABOUT LEARNING TO ESCAPE AFTERWARD WITH OUR DIGNITY AND SANITY INTACT. ~ Richard Templar

I will never be a brain surgeon, and I will never play the piano like Glenn Gould.

But what keeps me up late at night, and constantly gives me reason to fret, is this: I don't know what I don't know. There are universes of things out there - ideas, philosophies, songs, subtleties, facts, emotions - that exist but of which I am totally and thoroughly unaware. This makes me very uncomfortable. I find that the only way to find out the fuller extent of what I don't know is for someone to tell me, teach me or show me, and then open my eyes to this bit of information, knowledge, or life experience that I, sadly, never before considered.

Afterward, I find something odd happens. I find what I have just learned is suddenly everywhere: on billboards or in the newspaper or SMACK: Right in front of me, and I can't help but shake my head and speculate how and why I never saw or knew this particular thing before. And I begin to wonder if I could be any different, smarter, or more interesting had I discovered it when everyone else in the world found out about this particular obvious thing. I have been thinking a lot about these first discoveries and also those chance encounters: those elusive happenstances that often lead to defining moments in our lives.

[…]

I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thi ~ Debbie Millman

Legally, Moosbrugger's case could be summed up in-a sentence. He
was one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine
known even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility.
These unfortunates typically suffer not only substandard health
but also have a substandard disease, Nature has a peculiar prefer-
ence for producing such people in droves. Natura non fecit saltus,
she makes no jumps but prefers gradual transitions; even on the
grand scale she keeps the world in a transitional state between imbe-
cility and sanity. ~ Robert Musil