Quotes & Sayings About Sanity And Insanity

To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. ("The Medusa") — Thomas Ligotti

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

If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall. — Randy Alcorn

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

When I transformed my random and raw words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, a semblance of order and sanity appeared where there had been only chaos and insanity. — David Sheff

I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not. — Edgar Allan Poe

Sanity is the one unbelievable bore. One must be mad, slightly twisted - then one sees life from a new and entrancing angle. — Agatha Christie

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

Temporary Insanity had come a-knocking and I had shouted "Come on in the door is open." Luckily, Reality had come unexpectedly and found Temporary Insanity roaming the corridors of my mind unchecked, going into rooms, opening cupboards, reading my letters, looking in my underwear drawer, that kind of thing. Reality had run and got Sanity. And after a tussle, they both had managed to throw out Temporary Insanity and slam the door in his face. Temporary Insanity now lay on the gravel in the driveway of my mind, panting and furious, shouting, "She invited me in, you know. She asked me in. She wanted me there. — Marian Keyes

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over. — Margaret Atwood

I've been an inmate in Broadmoor, Rampton and Ashworth. I was one of 'them'. I was once Britain's most unstable madman! This book is a complete one off! If you're a nervous type of reader then don't read it. You've been warned! You are now entering the world of insanity; please keep hold of your sanity until the book comes to a stop! — Stephen Richards

The human race will last. Everywhere and forever, for it will never be sane and only insanity is divine. Only the mad destroy themselves and all they have wrought.
And only the phoenix lives forever. — Fredric Brown

The perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for him. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go. — Stephen King

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

Music is my therapy and my straitjacket. Music keeps me sane and keeps my mind on something. It's fragile up there. — Will.i.am

Society is what decides who's sane and who isn't, so you got to measure up. — Ken Kesey

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

Insanity," said Hatta, still mesmerized by his royal purple hair. "That always seemed the strangest word because it actually means out of sanity. Shouldn't someone who's in sanity be very sane? In means out. Curious."
"And they think we're the mad ones," laughed the smiling Cheshire Cat. — Daniel Coleman

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

Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. — Herman Melville

The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom. — Philip K. Dick

The only difference between me and a madman is I'm not mad. — Salvador Dali

Most people live uncomplicated lives. They have work and quietly rear their children. There is an order and sanity about them that keeps the world going. There is an outer disorder and insanity about my life which makes me a victim. One of the disorders is that they won't give us citizenship here ... — Bessie Head

[...] nobody anywhere seemed to be willing to ponder for a moment the possibility that a human being who refused to participate, who refused to speak or listen, who failed to 'interact with his peer group', might not be all that crazy, and might even have arrived at an understandable response to the world in which we lived. — Craig Harrison

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

There's a big difference between sanity and insanity. — Megan Gallagher

Is most of your work out there?" she asked. "Yeah." "Why didn't you move out there?" "'Cause LA is insanity, filled with fruits and nuts. Indiana is sanity, meat and potatoes. I'm a meat and potatoes man. — Kristen Ashley

She stopped shrieking after a moment. It wasn't the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn't managed to repair itself. She'd left something behind in that apartment. Something she'd always taken for granted. Faith in a rational world. It was like a tiny cog had been removed from her brain, and all the gears were still working, but a slight wobble was slowly and inevitably stripping the teeth until one day, without warning the Rube Goldberg device that was her mind would fall apart with a loud SPROING. — A. Lee Martinez

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

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

It's maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier. — David Lynch

Little did I realize that from that day onwards I was never to be my old normal self again, that I had unwittingly and without preparation or even adequate knowledge of it roused to activity the most wonderful and stern power in man, that I had stepped unknowingly upon the key to the most guarded secret of the ancients, and that thenceforth for a long time I had to live suspended by a thread, swinging between life on the one hand and death on the other, between sanity and insanity, between light and darkness, between heaven and earth. — Gopi Krishna

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad. — Michael Sheen

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

MOST OF US make a basic and reasonable assumption about sanity: we think it produces good results, and we believe insanity is a problem. — S. Nassir Ghaemi

Preserve my sanity, for to this I am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already. If I be sane, then surely it is maddening to think that of all the foul things that lurk in this hateful place. — Bram Stoker

That's what everyone forgets these days: there's a fine line between sanity and insanity. Lots of people are on the edge. We can't be in perfect balance all the time. — Poppy Adams

The cab driver is staring at me in his mirror. I'm talking to myself.
"The second sign of madness," I explain.
"What's the first one?"
"Killing lots of people and eating their genitals."
He laughs and sneaks another look at me. — Michael Robotham

Sanity involves a certain measure of impersonation, not simply for the benefit of husband and servants but for the sake, first and foremost, of one's own convictions. — Michael Cunningham

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

My intellect is a little way upon the wrong side of that narrow boundary-line between sanity and insanity. — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

It would be quite amusing to preach a bit to all those people who for many years now have been looking at our paintings and either laughed or shook their heads reproachfully. They do not believe that these impressions, these instant sensations, could contain even the smallest grain of sanity. If a tree is red or blue, or a face is blue or green, they are sure that is insanity. — Edvard Munch

Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity ... Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?
(Editorial, The Times, 22 July 1853) — Kate Summerscale

We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville. — Jim Butcher

He had found in himself the perfect, undeniable case of insanity. He possessed wisdom, patience, tolerance, truthfulness, loyalty, and moral fortitude - all the qualities that go to make an utter madman. — Machado De Assis

If most people owned up to their own insanity maybe the rest of the world would be diagnosed with sanity and we would lock them up for not fitting into our society. — Thatcher C. Nalley

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity. — Roberto Bolano

To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence. — Eckhart Tolle

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

When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

Love isn't crazy. Love isn't a degree of insanity. Love is sanity at its purest. It forces your soul to make a rational choice - a choice to make another person's happiness your priority, to allow them access to your heart and soul. — Lila Felix

"There was no public to humiliate him here. They already knew he was a lunatic. They expected it. He could burst into howls of insanity, and they would only smile those gentle smiles at him and wrestle him into the chains." — Laura Kinsale

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

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

Sometimes the dim veil between sanity and insanity is perception. — Luis Marques

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

Art, in the artist, is proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty in details. And the wonder and charm of it is the sanity in insanity which it denotes. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Insanity destroys reason, but not wit. — Nathanael Emmons

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

What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crisis ... and insanity is the only viable alternative. — Robert Anton Wilson

Sanity and sense becomes a prison. — Darnell Lamont Walker

Yet mad I am not...and very surely do I not dream. — Edgar Allan Poe

Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dreams these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in the wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed. Somewhere down the hill hammers and saws were busy and country music was playing out of somebody's truck radio. Zoyd was out of smokes. — Thomas Pynchon

Blood and wine are interchangeable.
Love and hate are unrecognizable.
Sanity is no longer with me. — A.P. Sweet

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

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

Sanity is not about confrontation. It's about filtering. Having a stable and happy life is about saying "no" to crazy people, not about inviting them in and then hoping that confrontations are going to make them sane. — Stefan Molyneux

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

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

So we gave the afternoon some sanity after all and I wonder, Uncle Andrew, is life sane, as we tried to make it? Or is it insanity, as it was yesterday on the Gerard plantation? And why don't more people try to make it sane?
Or if it is full of sanity for them, why do they try to rip that sanity to pieces and impose their form of insanity? Can you help me understand? — Ann Rinaldi

Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately. — Robert Aickman

For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam's front parlor? What is imagination without common sense, but the aspiration to out-dandy Beau Brummell with nothing but a bit of faded muslin and a limp cravat? What is Creation without common sense, but a scandalous thing without form or function, like a matron with half a dozen unattached daughters?
And God looked upon the Creation in all its delightful multiplicity, and saw that, all in all, it was quite Amiable. — Vera Nazarian

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

Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own. — Alyssa Reyans

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

I think of us as a people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its very nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it's done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away. — Spider Robinson

Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them. — George Eliot

Finding love should not cause you to lose your mind. — Amanda Mosher