INSANITY QUOTES

quotations about insanity

Insanity quote

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

Tags: Oliver Wendell Holmes


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

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If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them.

CHRISTOPHER MOORE

Practical Demonkeeping

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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

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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

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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


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


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

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When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

MARK TWAIN

Mark Twain's Notebook

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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

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All power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia

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We are all born mad. Some remain so.

SAMUEL BECKETT

Waiting for Godot

Tags: Samuel Beckett


In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.

JOHNNY CARSON

The Tonight Show

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Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

RAY BRADBURY

The Meadow

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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

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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"

Tags: Edgar Allan Poe


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


Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

GEORGE ORWELL

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Tags: George Orwell


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

Tags: Michael Marshall