INSANITY QUOTES
quotations about insanity
If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them.
CHRISTOPHER MOORE
Practical Demonkeeping
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind over tasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table
For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.
JEAN DEBUFFET
New Yorker, Jun 16, 1973
There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS
The Name of the Wind
You know, insane people are not insane all the time any more than sane people are sane all the time.
ELBERT HUBBARD
Address Delivered at the Centennial Commemoration of the death of Thomas Paine, June 5, 1909
There are lots of insane human beings around us. Their only advantage is that they are not locked up like those poor bings in the mental asylum. Actually these people are more dangerous than those in cells. The real insane people are in their own sweet world without causing any harm to the other person. But sanely insane people around us are causing lots of trouble wherever they go.
JOHI VALLI
Heart 2 Heart
Insanity is the final surrender.
MARTA CAMINERO-SANTANGELO
The Madwoman Can't Speak
A sane man often reasons from sound premises; an insane man commonly reasons as well, but the premises are unsound.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
MARK TWAIN
Mark Twain's Notebook
When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event. Like Robinson Crusoe's discovery of footprints on the sand.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Paris Review, fall 2000
All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
RAY BRADBURY
The Meadow
We are all born mad. Some remain so.
SAMUEL BECKETT
Waiting for Godot
We're all a little wacko sometimes, and if we think we're not, maybe we are more than we know.
MARIAH CAREY
Larry King Live, Dec. 19, 2002
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence-- whether much that is glorious-- whether all that is profound-- does not spring from disease of thought-- from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Eleonora"
Insanity is a disease of the brain; it is idiopathic; the nature of the organic alteration is unknown.
M. GEORGET
attributed, A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind
In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.
JOHNNY CARSON
The Tonight Show
I don't know what it is with the mad, but they've certainly got force of will. Maybe it's not having the checks and balances the rest of us have, or perhaps I'm kidding myself: maybe their minds are simply clearer, unclouded with the anxieties and morality that the rest of us are swaddled with. Perhaps they have the courage to point their magical thinking at the stars.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
GEORGE ORWELL
Nineteen Eighty-Four