Insane Sanity Quotes & Sayings

What a paradox it is, the sane causes more problems than the insane! It is! The real problems of the world do not come from the insane but, the sane! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Long ago they lowered insane persons into snake pits; they thought that an experience that might drive a sane person out of his wits might send an insane person back to sanity. — Mary Jane Ward

One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness — Anne Lamott

But Anja. I hear Anja's voice. Maybe I am insane. I hear her crying. I see her alone in the trees. I remember being alone and humiliated. I remember, too, the fat little boy hiding in the bathroom. And I see this man, Ariane. I see this evil man, Ariane. He laughs everyday still. He has had years of laughter. He has triumphed over the screams of others, he has triumphed with blood on his hands. And he laughs still. God has cursed us! He has either cursed us or He was never here to begin with. We've pretended God was here for our own sanity! That's the truth! We've pretended evil is punished and good is rewarded. A perfect scheme! — Sergio Troncoso

It's insane, but no more insane than Japan shutting down its entire nuclear reactor fleet in the middle of a heat wave because an extreme tsunami washed over one plant, or the USA invading a noninvolved Middle Eastern nation because a gang of crazies from somewhere else knocked down two skyscrapers. In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window. But sanity — Charles Stross

We are all insane. But how do you distinguish sanity from insanity, how do you diagnose abnormality in this new world? — Francesca Lia Block

In today's world hunger for sanity seems to be more intense than our hunger for food. — Munia Khan

Insanity on the other hand is an intellectual pattern. It may have biological causes but it has no physical or biological reality. No scientific instrument can be produced in court to show who is insane and who is sane. There's nothing about insanity that conforms to any scientific law of the universe. The scientific laws of the universe are invented by sanity. There's no way by which sanity, using the instruments of its own creation, can measure that which is outside of itself and its creations. Insanity isn't an 'object' of observation. It's an alteration of observation itself. There's no such thing as a 'disease' of patterns of intellect. There's only heresy. And that's what insanity really is. — Robert M. Pirsig

There is an area of the mind that could be called unsane, beyond sanity, and yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it. At one end there's insanity. You go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity. — Terence McKenna

Sanity is merely an insane aspiration. — D.B. Woodling

When one of us dies of cancer, loses her mind, or commits suicide, we must not blame her for her inability to survive an ongoing political mechanism bent on the destruction of that human being. Sanity remains defined simply by the ability to cope with insane conditions. — Ana Castillo

Just because I'm insane doesn't mean I have to act all crazy. — Diana Rowland

Only, as long as we're going insane we may as well go the whole way. A mere shred of sanity is of no value. — S. S. Van Dine

Sanity for anyone is pretty much out of the question, as both the saint and the sinner appear only equally insane: the saint appears it for actually believing in a place of eternal torment; the sinner, for deciding to risk going to that place of eternal torment. — Criss Jami

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. — Marcus Aurelius

O SANITY
It's only sane to be insane
Psychotic builds a castle
And neurotic lives in it
I don't know what to do with my sanity
When the world's at the verge of calamity
O' sanity, o' sanity
What am I to do with you
Drink up, shoot up, anything you please
But you're always standing behind me
Like a devil in hell
O' sanity, sanity
Why don't you let me go?
Let go, let go!
Cut it out! — Yoko Ono

You can't compare men or women with mental disorders to the normal expectations of men and women in without mental orders. Your dealing with symptoms and until you understand that you will always try to find sane explanations among insane behaviors. You will always have unreachable standards and disappointments. If you want to survive in a marriage to someone that has a disorder you have to judge their actions from a place of realistic expectations in regards to that person's upbringing and diagnosis. — Shannon L. Alder

It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment. — William Faulkner

Hope, in general, is dangerous. Hope can be the loose thread that pulls apart your sanity. — Alessandra Torre

Henke sensed her terrifying aptitude for destruction as never before. Henke had feared for her sanity; now she knew the truth was almost worse than that. Honor wasn't insane - she simply didn't care. She'd lost not only her sense of balance but any desire to regain it. — David Weber

Conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this, the mightiest of empires, but what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes; that nothing lasts forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit. — Mumia Abu-Jamal

Every isolated passion, is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as synthesis of insanities. Every dominant passion generates a dominant fear, the fear of its non-fulfillment. Every dominant fear generates a nightmare, sometimes in form of explicit and conscious fanaticism, sometimes in paralyzing timidity, sometimes in an unconscious or subconscious terror which finds expression only in dreams. The man who wishes to preserve sanity in a dangerous world should summon in his own mind a parliament of fears, in which each in turn is voted absurd by all the others. — Bertrand Russell

The Holy Spirit Asks that you accept the idea of one mind wholeheartedly, for this is the Correction to the error called ego. The ego was the belief in private minds with private thoughts, but if mind is one the ego has no foundation on which to stand. Forgiveness reflects the oneness that shines beyond perception. Forgiveness unifies and shows the world anew. You are not going insane, you are going inward to sanity of mind. And unified perception is the gateway to the remembrance of God and Christ. — David Hoffmeister

Seeing him brought in, has, I think, saved me from losing my mind; for that I do not thank him-sanity, after all is only reason applied to human affairs, and when this reason, applied over years, has resulted in disaster, destruction, despair, misery, starvation, and rot, the mind is correct to abandon it. This decision to discard reason, I see now, is not the last but the first reasonable act; and this insanity we are taught to fear consists in nothing but responding naturally and instinctively rather than with the culturally acquired, mannered thing called reason; an insane man talks nonsense because like a bird or a cat he is too sensible to talk sense. — Gene Wolfe

All I want to be is normally insane. — Marlon Brando

The reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66] — Anne Lamott

We seldom consider how much of our lives we must render in return for some object we barely want, seldom need, buy only because it was put before us ... And this is understandable given the workings of our system where without a job we perish, where if we don't want a job and are happy to get by we are labeled irresponsible, non-contributing leeches on society. But if we hire a fleet of bulldozers, tear up half the countryside and build some monstrous factory, casino or mall, we are called entrepreneurs, job-creators, stalwarts of the community. Maybe we should all be shut away on some planet for the insane. Then again, maybe that is where we are. — Ferenc Mate

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane. — Hermann Hesse

Sanity is transmuting all the insane parts of your brain into a creative outlet. — Jaeda DeWalt

In an insane world, sanity made very little sense. — Rachel Caine

Sometimes getting insane is all worth it, because sanity doesn't make sense all the time. — Sarvesh Jain

Women have been driven mad, "gaslighted," for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each others' sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other. — Adrienne Rich

It's the process of writing and life that matters.Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories. — Natalie Goldberg

People who detest their sanity love to tell you they are insane, authors included...and all for a few bucks. Their charlatan madness is masturbation. — W.T. Shad

American society is uncomfortable with the idea that some people's lives are difficult past the point of sanity and that they aren't necessarily to blame. There's no way you can argue that everyone has a difficult life. This is an incredible culture; the majority of people live in amazing comfort, with real dignity, maybe more comfort and dignity than any other culture in the history of the world. We live relatively safe and sane lives, which, if you've ever loved anybody and therefore feared for them, is a wonderful thing. But part of our moral responsibility is to keep in our minds those whose lives are unsafe and insane. In this way, fiction can be like a meditation, a way of saying: Though things are this way for me right now, they could be different later and are different for others this very moment. — George Saunders

We are insane. That is what sin is. Sanctity is identitical with sanity. It means living the truth, living in reality. Sin always substitutes unreality for reality. — Peter Kreeft

The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world. — Chris Hedges

Live in robust sanity, in holy obedience to the ordinary." (The Message) "In an insane asylum like the world, simple sanity can be a heroic achievement. — Peter Kreeft

To take away a man's sanity, answer all his prayers and solve all his problems. Or give him everything and everyone he wants. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Sanity and enlightenment ... I've been reading a new book Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries, and it contains a commentary on Genjo Koan by Shunryu Suzuki, the author who wrote Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. He doesn't mention sanity at all but I think that one possible definition of enlightenment would be a kind of profound sanity, where being insane is no longer an option. — Brad Warner

A difference between the sane and the insane is not just about appearance or attitude but the usage of time. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I am yet to see an insane who would use the mid of the high way as a home. Regardless of the degree of insanity, there is always a regard for the value and essence of life — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. — Edgar Allan Poe

As long as you doubt your sanity, you can't be insane. — Miles Keaton Andrew

What if death drives us insane? What if we survive, but it drives us insane? What then? — Stephen King

I know, Little Man, you are quick with the diagnosis of craziness when you meet a truth you don't like. And you feel yourself as the 'homo normalis'. You have locked up crazy people, and the normal people manage this world. Who then is to blame for all the misery? Not you, of course, you only do your duty, and who are you to have an opinion of your own? I know, you don't have to repeat it. It isn't you that matters, Little Man. But when I think of your newborn children, of how you torture them in order to make them into 'normal' human beings after your image. — Wilhelm Reich

I would much rather have my grotesque products of the imagination compared to your delusional sanity. — Christopher Page

There is nothing more amazing than the extraordinary sanity of the insane! Unless it is the extraordinary eccentricity of the sane! — Agatha Christie

People frequently claim to be going insane. But I've never heard somebody say they were going sane. Perhaps its because sanity isn't a desirable destination. — Kyra Davis

The conundrum of sanity and insanity, is that it serves us to be some of each. It's really only a question of degrees. You cannot possibly be 100% adjusted and live in this INSANE world. A little bit of crazy is a coping skill. — Kelli Jae Baeli

The World is insane. With tiny spots of sanity, here and there ... Not the other way around! — John Cleese

If you think people in your life are normal, then you undoubtedly have not spent any time getting to know the abnormal side of them. — Shannon L. Alder

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on the proper occasions.
Henry Ward Beecher — Henry Ward Beecher

No one wants to occupy a black hole of sadness and despair or slip on the tight rope that separates sanity from insanity, and reside in a vortex devoid of reality. I entered the world as a freeman and desire to escape a state of existential vertigo. I yearn to discover a synthesizing spirit of my being and hold my head high, free of doubt, and devoid of fear. I wish to foment the cerebral energy to stave off premature destruction and forevermore blunt an intolerable state of anguish. — Kilroy J. Oldster

A sane person who dwells among the mad will become insane because they will act like the mad. One who cares and treats the insane will have mad traits. A sane man who lives among the mad will be made mad by virtue of his associations and dealings. No sane person can dwell among the mad unless if that person is mad himself/herself. A mad person percieves madness and has no clear object or picture that can come out of his mind. Remember sore grapes can ruin good tasty grapes when taken together.You can't live amongst pigs if you are not a pig yourself. Therefore how can the mad treat their fellow mad. That is vanity too be treated by a mad physician who thinks he is sane. The treatment of a mad person speaks volumes and appears to suggest and show that they are treated in a haphazard way without a clear path in regard to recovering their sanity. — David Ssembajjo

I wonder sometimes whether a person has to become insane these days in order to feel certain things. Lessing once said, Who doesn't become insane over certain things, has no sanity to lose, — Erich Fromm

If you're going to question your sanity whenever someone tells you you're insane, you'll spend your life in misery. — Cameron Jace

Because we are limited in our knowledge, even the sanest of us are slightly insane. Our limitations are a kind of madness, and we can only choose to deny we are mad, and so descend into a dark spiral of total insanity, or accept we are mad and embark on a quest to regain our true and wholesome sanity — Dwight Longenecker

In our national parlance, what's usually meant by the word "maverick" is someone who skirts the edge of sanity
or is so insane as to appear sane
who then does something absolutely insane and yet, after the passage of time, and especially if the maverick's creation yields a profit of any kind, is deemed less and less insane until the maverick worms his or her way into the fibers of history. Then generations grow to envy the ingenuity and courage of the maverick while glossing over the maverick's genetic kookiness. On such shoulders, a country rises. — Michael Paterniti

Lust makes you insane, love gives you sanity. — Jeffrey Fry

I think real enlightenment is total sanity, a kind of acceptance of what actually is. It does involve a kind of different way of looking at things. As I've done this Zen practice for years and years, I've acquired what I realize is an almost upside down view of life compared to what most people think, which is just what I used to think it was too. It's not really an insane view, at least I hope it's not. — Brad Warner

My feeling is that sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence up because we don't want to be rejected by other people - and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way. — Keith Johnstone

While we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices ... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane. — Philip Jose Farmer

Sanity is actually a pretence, a way we learn to behave. We keep this pretence up because we don't want to be rejected by other people - and being classified insane is to be shut out of the group in a very complete way.
Most people I meet are secretly convinced that they're a little crazier than the average person. People understand the energy necessary to maintain their own shields, but not the energy expended by other people. They understand that their own sanity is a performance, but when confronted by other people they confuse the person with the role.
Sanity has nothing directly to do with the way you think. Its a matter of presenting yourself as safe. — Keith Johnstone

There's no such thing as normal. There is no definition of normal. Normal is subjective. You can't - and shouldn't - force yourself to want something 'normal' and stop wanting what you truly want. It's a sure way to make your life miserable. — Alessandra Hazard

A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world. — Lois Wyse

Was it possible that perhaps the most plausible explanation was being offered by someone who anyone with an ounce of sanity would have long ago consigned to the realm of the insane? — Tim Horvath

It's an insane world but in it there is one sanity, the loyalty of old friends — Stephen Boyd

Granted, this system is insane, but we must not let sanity stand in the way of airport security. — Dave Barry

Madness is like an alternative residence. When sanity chases you out of home, take shelter in madness. — Munia Khan

When you're the only sane person, you look like the only insane person. — Criss Jami

Can a need for sanity reach insane proportions? — Michael R. Fletcher

The "pathology of normalcy" rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic. — Erich Fromm

I know there is a thin silver line between the sane and the insane, and even in that realm of madness, there are degrees of reason, fluttering moments of clarity and truth. Maybe the world can't handle the their truth. Maybe we are too weak. Maybe, like Sloth used to say, It's the blind who see the most. — Julie Cantrell

Kaysen elaborates through parts of the book on her thoughts about how mental illness is treated. She explains that families who are willing to pay the rather high costs of hospitalization do so to prove their own sanity. Once one member of the family is hospitalized, it becomes easier for the rest of the family to distance themselves from the problem and to create a clear boundary between the sane and the insane. Recognizing a family member or friend as insane makes others around them, says Kaysen, compare themselves to that individual. Hospitalization allows for distance from this questioning of self that makes us so uncomfortable. Her view that mental illness often includes the entire family means the hospitalized family member becomes an excuse for other family members not to look at their own problems. This explains the willingness to pay the high financial costs of hospitalization. — Susanna Kaysen

Getting drunk every Friday night and thinking that it's normal, only to get mad every Monday, looks normal only because most people are insane. It becomes abnormal when it affects your relationships
and you push people you want away with a smile and cry when they're gone. That's when a person should question her own sanity. If that still doesn't make one question it, then that's a very deep stage of insanity. That's not life. That's the scenario for an apocalyptic movie. — Robin Sacredfire

For the more a soul conforms to the sanity of others, the more does it become insane. — Mary Webb

I seem to remember asking myself if I was insane, and answering, 'Of couse I am - sanity is a compromise. Sanity is the thing that keeps one back. — Aleister Crowley

We need to think long and hard about sanity, a word most of us cling to with a steel grip. Does fear of being regarded by others as insane confine me in a cage of "responsible" behavior that limits my freedom and cripples my ability to love? And is it in fact such a wonderful thing to be regarded as sane? After all, the chief administrator of the Holocaust, Adolph Eichmann, was declared "quite sane" by the psychiatrists who examined him before his trial in Jerusalem. Surely the same psychiatrists would have found Saint Basil, Saint Theodore and Saint Xenia all insane - and Saint Francis, and that most revered of all mad men, the Son of Man, the Savior, Jesus of Nazareth. — Jim Forest

People who smoke would have probably been regarded as fools or insane, if only a percentage of people who smoke smoked. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Pardon My Sanity In A World Insane — Emily Dickinson

Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? — Charles Dickens

She'd been questioning Jenni's sanity for a while now, but then again, they were all slightly insane now, weren't they? — Rhiannon Frater