Saner Quotes & Sayings

I knew a man who, in the age of chain-saws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts. — Wendell Berry

survive difficult parenting moments, and they want their kids and their family to thrive. As parents ourselves, we share these same goals for our own families. In our nobler, calmer, saner moments, we care about nurturing our kids' minds, increasing their sense of wonder, and helping them reach their — Daniel J. Siegel

Dave Wann's recipes from his own experience in Simple Prosperity are a breath of fresh air, and just what we need for a saner future. They include ideas, sound research and down-to-earth advice we can all use. This book is also much more: a friendly, personal guidebook for living a more enjoyable, healthy, loving life. — Hazel Henderson

Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner. — Thomas Carlyle

Stick to musicians. I think we're generally saner. — Emily St. John Mandel

If you aren't normal, it's because you're tougher, saner, cooler than normal. — Dashiell Hammett

With industrialization has come a general depreciation of work. As the price of work has gone up, the value of it has gone down, until it is so depressed that people simply do not want to do it anymore. We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit- a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation. This is explained, of course, by the dullness of the work, by the loss of responsibility for, or credit for, or knowledge of the thing made. What can be the status of the working small farmer in a nation whose motto is a sigh of relief: Thank God it's Friday? — Wendell Berry

The madder the battle, the saner the peace. — Gregory Maguire

The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person. — Frank Barron

Practically every mental health care practitioner, from the most erudite psychoanalysts to untrained self-help gurus, tell us that it is infinitely more fulfilling and we are all saner if we tell the truth, yet most of us are not rushing to stand up and be counted among the truth tellers. Indeed, as someone committed to being honest in daily life I experience the constant drag of being seen as a 'freak,' for telling the truth, even when I speak truthfully about simple matters. If a friend gives me a gift and asks me to tell him or her whether I like it, I will respond honestly and judiciously; that is to say I will speak the truth in a positive, caring manner. Yet even in this situation, the person who asks for honesty will often express annoyance when given a truthful response. — Bell Hooks

This [Scientology] is useful knowledge. With it the blind again see, the lame walk, the ill recover, the insane become sane and the sane become saner. By its use the thousand abilities Man has sought to recover become his once more. — L. Ron Hubbard

To my way of thinking and working, the greatest service a piece of fiction can do any reader is to leave him with a higher ideal of life than he had when he began. If in one small degree it shows him where he can be ... gentler, saner, cleaner, kindlier ... it is a wonder-working book. If it opens his eyes to one beauty in nature he never saw for himself and leads him one step toward the God of the Universe, it is a beneficial book ... — Gene Stratton-Porter

Don't worry if they say you're crazy. They said that about me and yet I was saner than all of them. I knew. No matter. You know. Insane or sane, you know. It's a good thing to know - no matter what they call it. — Anne Sexton

The saner you are, the crazier you are. — Marc Marcel

I'm not much crazier than anybody else, but I'm not much saner. — Robert Stone

Exploitation of the Negro through economic restriction and segregation the present system is sound and will doubtless continue until this gives place to the saner policy of actual interracial cooperation
not the present farce of racial manipulation in which the Negro is a figurehead. — Carter G. Woodson

Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches men, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work. — W.E.B. Du Bois

God is the single worst idea human beings ever had. — Reg Saner

But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no rational man or woman would have chosen this way of life - therefore, it is madness. Alone I confront them and tell them that nothing could be saner or truer! What do people really know about life? We fall in line, follow the pattern established by our mentors. Everything is based on assumptions; even time, space, motion, matter are nothing but supposition. The world has no new knowledge to impart; it merely accepts what is there. — Knut Hamsun

Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, "If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else." "Whereas women can't?" "I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I'm characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and healthier." "Hmmmm. — Neal Stephenson

I am guilty of believing that the human race can be humanized and enriched in every spiritual inference through the saner and more beneficent processes of peaceful persuasion applied to material problems rather than through wars, riots and bloodshed. — Eugene V. Debs

I did feel a concentrated dislike for those boys, who couldn't submit to the odd faithless girlfriend, needling classmate, or dose of working-single-parent distraction
who couldn't serve their miserable time in their miserable public schools the way the rest of us did
without carving their dime-a-dozen problems ineluctably into the lives of other families. It was the same petty vanity that drove these boys' marginally saner contemporaries to scrape their dreary little names into national monuments. And the self-pity! That nearsighted Woodham creature apparently passed a note to one of his friends before staging a tantrum with his father's deer rifle: "Throughout my life I was ridiculed. Always beaten, always hated. Can you, society, blame me for what I do?" And I thought, Yes, you little shit! In a heartbeat! — Lionel Shriver

At least this mountain world, to which I owed so much of life and happiness, would stand above the ruin of human hopes, the heritage of a saner generation of men. — Eric Shipton

Not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use. For this is the only means that capitalism has at its disposal to achieve the level of devaluation now required. The idea is dreadful in its implications. What better reason could there be to declare that it is time for capitalism to be gone, to give way to some saner mode of production? — David Harvey

She might, in fact, go crazy, as has happened to a lot of people who break rules. Not the people who play at rebellion but really only solidify their already dominant positions in society ... but those who take some larger action that disrupts the social order. Who try to push through the doors that are usually closed to them. They do sometimes go crazy, these people, because the world is telling them not to want the things they want. It can seem saner to give up
but then one goes insane from giving up. — E. Lockhart

Tea. There is nothing saner than tea, he thought ... Tea was the great leveler. It brought calm, quiet, contentment, warmth. And it was something to do.
... Tea
so normal, so mundane, so hot ...
... The heat and scent of it permeated his head and cleared his mind. He understood completely the attraction of ceremonies grounded in the ritual of drinking tea.
It required both caution and abandonment of the senses. It demanded that you move into it slowly and savor the moment. And it rewarded you with warmth and delicacy of taste and refreshment.
And after you were done, it could parse out your future. — Thea Devine

We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the executive suites as on the assembly lines. One works not because the work is necessary, valuable, useful to a desirable end, or because one loves to do it, but only to be able to quit - a condition that a saner time would regard as infernal, a condemnation. — Wendell Berry

How different conditions would be today in the Middle East, how much saner and safer the entire earth might be, had those Christians not defiled a civilization too advanced for their arrogant little minds to understand. — Tom Robbins

I invite you to enter the world of my Dragon Kin - where the dragons are much saner than the humans surrounding them could ever hope to be. - G.A. Aiken — G.A. Aiken

Thus the creative genius may be at once nave and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person. — Frank X. Barron

It was just a temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened. — Rob Sheffield

Thought of Riordan. Thought of a big hand wrapping around my shaft, sliding up and down, pumping hard ... harder. The head of my cock leaked a single salty tear to slick my own hand's efforts. Yikes. Think of Bruce. Yeah. Better. Safer. Saner ... — Josh Lanyon

It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them. — Charles Horton Cooley

All that alcohol does for them is to liberate the sense of sin, which reason suppresses in saner moments. — Bertrand Russell

Painter"
"I said you are only keeping me here
in the hospital, lying to my parents
and saying I am madder than I am,
because you only want to keep me here,
squeezing my last dollar to the pennies
I'm saner than anyone in the hospital.
I had to say what every madman says
a black phrase, the sleep of reason mothers monsters ...
When I am painting the canvas is a person;
all I do, each blot and line's alive,
when I am finished, it is shit on the canvas ...
But in his sketches more finished than his oils,
sketches made after he did those masterpieces,
constable can make us see the breeze ... — Robert Lowell

Money was a much saner goal than adoration. They'll both drive you crazy but if I'm going to blow my brains out for five years, I want something to show for it. — Glenn Frey

This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane. — Kurt Vonnegut

You chose to stop acknowledging a world that has treated you foully. What's saner than that? — Mindy McGinnis

Much of a behavior acceptable today would be socially offensive in a saner or more logical arrangement. — Jacque Fresco

He was saner than anyone --had fallen out of the world of illusion: love, interesting work, hope for the future. — John Gardner

We believed it was better to pay as you go than it was to pay your bills by borrowing and laying up debts for another day. To pay as you go, that policy is a safer business policy and a saner business policy, and we thought it was a saner national policy. — Scott Nearing

If people could understand how much pleasure they could have by themselves, I think everyone would be a lot saner. I think that people really need a dose of quality time with one's self. — Lydia Lunch

Whatever Arys had been up to recently, it wasn't any saner than what I'd been doing. He was losing it, and I was willing to bet he didn't even realize it. At least I knew I was going mad. — Trina M. Lee

Self-government is our right," [Roger Casement] declared. "A thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself - than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers, or to love our kind ... Where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours ... then surely it is braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel ... than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men. — Adam Hochschild

From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next. — Jon Meacham

The curve of imagination, the curve of brilliance and the curve of sanity are identical curves or at least similar curves ... The more imagination a person has, why, the more intelligence, the more knowingness he has and the saner he's going to be. — L. Ron Hubbard

That's what science is about: seeing the exact same things that other people do, finding the units of measurement with which to describe those things, communicating in the fewest and most precise words available. What could be saner - or more sociable - than that? — Barbara Ehrenreich

Death and suffering can't matter nearly as much as I think they do. Since they are so common, my taking them so seriously must mean that I am insane. I must try to be saner. Which — Kurt Vonnegut

The other person doesn't have to consciously join you in the change. 'Whoever is saner at the time,' says A Course in Miracles, 'is to invite the Holy Spirit into a situation.' It doesn't matter whether or not another person shares our willingness to let God enter. Everything you need in life already exists inside your head. — Marianne Williamson

Unlike yellow and brown people, the white does not usually believe he can get attention from matter or objects.
...
The white goes further. He often believes he can get attention only from whites and that yellow and brown people's attention is worthless. Thus the yellow and brown races are not very progressive, but, by and large, saner. — L. Ron Hubbard

In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn't have it both ways, he'd pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they're supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with. — Margaret Atwood

All stories are love stories, and there are numerous kinds of love, from the love of a mother holding her child for the first time to the love of blood that drives a psychopath, so I will always write about love, but not necessarily romance. Let the saner people do that. — Alcatraz Dey

You hear some people talk about border security and a wall and all that. To me, I don't know that you need any of that if you had a better, saner way to let people into the country in the first place. — Scott Walker

In the future, in a saner system, we would design products not to wear out and break down; to last as long as possible, so that the responsibility of the service sector would not be overloaded. — Jacque Fresco

When shall the saner softer polities Whereof we dream, have play in each proud land, And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas? — Thomas Hardy

It was said that Dworkin himself had penned the Book in his saner days, and that long passages had come direct from the Unicorn. I don't know. I wasn't there. It is also said that we are descended of Dworkin and the Unicorn, which gives rise to some unusual mental images. — Roger Zelazny

We can never thank David Stern enough. His vision to use basketball to improve the quality of our lives to make this world a better and saner place, that guy, is the most important man in the history of basketball. — Bill Walton

It wasn't that Harry had gone down the wrong path, it wasn't that the road to sanity lay somewhere outside of science. But reading science papers hadn't been enough. All the cognitive psychology papers about known bugs in the human brain and so on had helped, but they hadn't been sufficient. He'd failed to reach what Harry was starting to realise was a shockingly high standard of being so incredibly, unbelievably rational that you actually started to get things right,as opposed to having a handy language in which to describe afterwards everything you'd just done wrong. Harry could look back now and apply ideas like 'motivated cognition' to see where he'd gone astray over the last year. That counted for something, when it came to being saner in the future. That was better than having no idea what he'd done wrong. But that wasn't yet being the person who could pass through Time's narrow keyhole, the adult form whose possibility Dumbledore had been instructed by seers to create. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

The majority of the people of the world today are unsane, not insane, unsane meaning having been exposed to methods of evaluation that have long rendered obsolete, our language in the future will change to a saner language where we have no argument in it, 'can there be such a language?' there is, when engineers talk to each other, it's not subject to interpretation, they use math, they use descriptive systems, if I interpreted what another engineer said in the way I think he meant it: you couldn't build bridges, dams, power transmission lines. The language has to have meaning — Jacque Fresco

The sane are madder than we think, the mad saner. — Anthony Storr

As well as the [League of Nations] delegates themselves and their suites, there were innumerable campaigners of one sort and another, male and female, clerical and lay, young and old; all with some notion to publicise, some pet solution to offer, some organisation to promote. They gathered in droves, fanning out through the city, and settling in hotels and pensions, from the Lakeside ones down to tiny obscure back-street establishments. Ferocious ladies with moustaches, clergymen with black leather patches on the elbows of their jackets or cassocks and smelling of tobacco smoke, mad admirals who knew where to find the lost tribes of Israel, and scarcely saner generals who deduced prophetic warnings from the measurement of the pyramids; but one and all believers in the League's historic role to deliver mankind painlessly and inexpensively from the curse of war to the great advantage of all concerned. — Malcolm Muggeridge