Best 280 quotes in «sanity quotes» category

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.

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.

The older you are, and the faster you walk, the crazier you look.

The first part of madness is believing what you hear. The Second is acting on it.

The heightened sanity of science and the sheer lunacy of magic. It's in the area where they overlap that we both are able to find... ecstasy!

The holiness of solitude is the gift of creativity.

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.

The moment her hymen was plucked from her body in the wilderness, Her soul was taken from sanity.

Then he heard a wild, high-pitched cackling that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. It wasn't sane, that laugh. In fact, it was the laughter of someone who never had more than a nodding acquaintance with sanity.

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.

The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I’m a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know—what’ll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there’s nothing to be well adjusted to!

The problem with social media is that it's great for your ego, but terrible for your sanity.

The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.

The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.

What's the difference between sanity and madness anyway? We all play headgames with ourselves. We all have baggage. We all cope somehow. I'm not sure if I'm mad or sane. I mean, I hold my life together, I pay my bills, I raise my kids. But the world is so polarized and bizarre now that for some people, none of these these things matter if they're not wearing the right shoes or don't have the right credit score or a fancy family car. Some people think the most important things to worry about are handbags and tan lines. Meanwhile, war and crime and poverty unfold all around us, and we ignore it. In that environment, how can we even begin to talk about sanity and madness?

When you are madly in love with someone, even when sanity tries to rescue you, you wrestle it.

Writing is a solitary existence, especially if you forget to chat to your friends – sorry, I meant characters.

There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person.

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.

The sweetness of adversity: we develop the sanity of solitude.

The world is too sane. It could use a little madness.

The world went insane before I did, I'm just adapting to the new reality.

They had stripped us of everything we were taught made us women, and then told us we were mad.

They say isolation drives you crazy. Sure it does - when you can't get enough of it.

Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent.

Time is not an enemy as such, but a missing person, sending cryptic postcards from the past.

To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic.

To maintain any degree of sanity, we must believe that everything is interconnected on some level and to experience that level fully once in a while.

To remain sane in a mad world is the true victory.

To stay sane in a mad world is the real victory.

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

Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.

True vehement love is at the opposite side of sanity.

unless you want to go to jail, you're not working hard enough

We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I’m well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on.

We all talk to ourselves. Those we call mad just talk a little louder.

We are poor indeed if we are only sane.

...we have no right to decide off-hand that it is an unnatural pleasure to eat sawdust. A man might be constituted so that he liked it. And so long as his peculiarity doesn't damage or interfere with other people, there's no reason why he shouldn't be left alone. But if it is the man's fixed belief that sawdust eating is essential to human happiness; if he attributes almost everything that happens either to the effects of eating it or not eating it; if he imagines that most of the people he meets are also sawdust-eaters, and above all, if he thinks that the salvation of the world depends entirely upon making laws to compel people to eat sawdust, whether they like it or not, then it is fair to say that his mind is unbalanced on the subject; and that, further, the practice itself, however innocent it may appear, is in that particular case perverse. Sanity consists in the proper equilibrium of ideas in general. That is the only sense in which it is true that genius is connected with insanity.

We rode in silence, I think all of us wondering what was behind the flowery wallpaper our perceptions had always pasted on the unknown. All the things the mind won't allow us to see, to protect our sanity, or our soul, or maybe just to keep the shit out of our pants.

Wesley was really the only thing getting me through those weeks. Some part of me was appalled at myself, but what could I say? I needed that escape-that high-more than ever, and he was always just a short drive away. A fix three or four times a week was all it took to keep me sane. God, I was like a fucking druggie. Maybe my sanity was long gone already.

We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough.

What an ass you are!” Satan said. “Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is.

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!

What I cannot love, I overlook.

What slave work do you want me to do for you?” asked Diogenes when he had been bought. “Be a teacher to my children,” answered Xeniades with the insanity that matched the wisdom of Diogenes.

What she had done over the past year had required an equivalent expenditure of energy to a year-long sprint, and when she thought of it that way it was obviously an unreasonable thing to do. Remaining sane--clinging and grasping at it, seeking to please a propriety constructed by people whose boyfriends had never killed themselves--was in fact the most insane thing she could have done, and anyone properly equipped by the right kind of experience would understand that.

When in love try keeping your heart sane. Once it loses sanity the mind usually follows the course.

When psychotherapy began, it was about the practitioner listening to a patient and interpreting what the patient said, in order to afford the patient insights about his or her psyche. But now we understand that the main curative part of psychotherapy is the relationship itself. It appears not to be relevant which psychology school the practitioner belongs to. What matters is the quality of the relationship and the practitioner's belief in what he or she is offering.

Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar--I say, you say, he and she, it, on the other hand, does not say--paying for the privilege of sanity with common coin, with meanings we've agreed on.

WHO AM I? I have seven heavenly panels Leading up to a pointed sphere I’m multidimensional like a crystal And my center is never clear. I’m an inventor and pioneer. A mentor to my peers. But I'm not as sound as my shell reveals, Because I’m tormented by my fears - That may appear to be grounded But my insides are filled with tears. And the sadness is well-founded, From years and years Of traumatic experiences Compounded In the most demented Atmospheres. I talk but feel like nobody hears. Has reason disappeared? And, God, are you near? This is Giza’s 7th light force And I'm asking you to interfere. I can no longer walk amongst the blind and dead With open eyes and ears. I’m trying to maintain my sanity And to straighten up my veneer As I roll amongst the growing calamities Flowing on Earth’s severely trashed Frontier. Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun (2010)