Best 280 quotes in «sanity quotes» category

... I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad.

I have clients who are nowhere near as insane as their family is, but they're the people who have been targeted with the mental illnesses because that’s convenient for everyone involved.

I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

I have not been sane since the day I learnt that sanity is gravity of the abyss of subjugation.

...I have sometimes imagined my own sanity as resting on the surface of a membrane, a thin and fragile membrane that can easily be ripped open, plunging me into the abyss of madness, where I join the tumbling souls whose membranes have likewise been pieced over the ages. Sometimes, when my thoughts are especially fevered, I can visualize the agent of this piercing. It is a watchful presence at the edge of things, silent and dripping, a stranger in a raincoat... When we fall into such psychosis, there are no other membranes below to catch and protect us. And the horror and helplessness of the fall are intensified by an uncaring world.

I have tried to live my life with no regrets. Because regrets will become guilt in some cases, and guilt eats away at your sanity.

I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance for the destiny of humanity) and a false idea (namely, that art is superfluous luxury).

I know, Little Man, you are quick with the diagnosis of craziness when you meet a truth you don’t like. And you feel yourself as the ‘homo normalis’. You have locked up crazy people, and the normal people manage this world. Who then is to blame for all the misery? Not you, of course, you only do your duty, and who are you to have an opinion of your own? I know, you don’t have to repeat it. It isn’t you that matters, Little Man. But when I think of your newborn children, of how you torture them in order to make them into ‘normal’ human beings after your image.

I’m thankful for my sanity or whatever’s left of it.

In any sane society, a farmer is a billion times more important than an economist.

I'm trapped in my mind and I know it's crazy Hey, it's not that bad at all

In a mad world, only the mad are sane. - AKIRA KUROSAWA

In a world that thought itself so wise yet behaved so stupidly, it was possible sometimes to believe that only the mad saw matters as they truly were, that only people like my brother were prepared to admit what they saw from the corner of their eye.

I really believe," said Wanda thoughtfully,"that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane.

I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?" Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard, "Yes, I'm afraid of spiders." "Were you always?" "What are you, a psychiatrist?" Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine's eyes on him, appraising his line of questioning. "Is it possible that the trauma of losing your best friend as a child and the trauma of losing your wife as an adult and the trauma of seeing Laine's husband take his life in front of you just recently..." Pritam shrugged and raised his palms, "You see where I'm going?" Nicholas looked at Laine. She watched back. Her gray eyes missed nothing. "Sure," agreed Nicholas, standing. "And my sister's nuts, too, and we both like imagining that little white dogs are big nasty spiders because our daddy died and we never got enough cuddles." "Your father died?" asked Laine. "When?" "Who cares?" Pritam sighed. "You must see this from our point of - " "I'd love to!" snapped Nicholas. "I'd love to see it from your point of view, because mine is not that much fun! It's insane! It's insane that I see dead people, Pritam! It's insane that this," he flicked out the sardonyx necklace,"stopped me from kidnapping a little girl!" "That's what you believe," Pritam said carefully. "That's what I fucking believe!" Nicholas stabbed his finger through the air at the dead bird talisman lying slack on the coffee table.

In Peru," said Gonzalo, "they cure madness by placing the madman next to a flowing river. The water flows, he throws stones into it, his feelings begin to flow again, and he is cured.

In today's world hunger for sanity seems to be more intense than our hunger for food.

I prayed for death so as not to live in madness.

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.

In the 1950s at least less was expected of women. Now we're supposed to build a career, build a home, be the supermum that every child deserves, the perfect wife, meet the demands of elderly parents, and still stay sane.

INTROSPECTION AND INSANITY: A GODELIAN PROBLEM I think it can have suggestive value to translate Godel's Theorem into other domains, provided one specifies in advance that the translations are metaphorical and are not intended to be taken literally. That having been said, I see two major ways of using analogies to connect Godel's Theorem and human thoughts. One involves the problem of wondering about one's sanity. How can you figure out if you are sane? This is a Strange Loop indeed. Once you begin to question your own sanity, you can get trapped in an ever-tighter vortex of self-fulfilling prophecies, though the process is by no means inevitable. Everyone knows that the insane interpret the world via their own peculiarly consistent logic; how can you tell if your own logic is 'peculiar' or not, given that you have only your own logic to judge itself? I don't see any answer. I am just reminded of Godel's second Theorem, which implies that the only versions of formal number theory which assert their own consistency are inconsistent...

It is a well-worn truth that cops grow callous, a cliché so tattered that it is even common on television. All cops face things every day that are so gruesome, brutal, and bizarre that no normal human being could deal with them on a daily basis and stay sane. And so they learn not to feel, to grow and maintain a poker-faced whimsy toward all the surprising things their fellow humans find to do to each other. All cops practice not-feeling, and it may be that Miami cops are better at it than others, since they have so many opportunities to learn.

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.

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.

It might come a time to not follow your passion, so to speak, although it must be prioritized. It may be the case that your passion will serve as the medic, your peace of mind, alongside a higher calling, with your higher calling being the point man.

It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I'd seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence.

It’s a sad state of affairs when I’m the one bringing sanity to the equation

It’s like I need to love you to come back whole from where I sometimes go.

It is impossible for the sane to truly understand madness.

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.

I was back in disgust. I stood in the centre of the big room, naked, letting the heat strike me from the three points of heat, and I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never really understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. The texture of the carpet was abhorrent to me, a dead processed thing; my body was a thin, meagre, spiky sort of vegetable, like an unsunned plant; and when I touched the hair on my head it was dead. I felt the floor bulge up under me. The walls were losing their density. I knew I was moving down into a new dimension, further away from sanity than I had ever been. I knew I had to get to the bed fast. I could not walk, so I let myself down on my hands and knees and crawled to the bed and lay on it, covering myself.

It takes an insane person to understand the language of insanity.

I wasn't convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I'm not sure that's true. I still think about it. I'll always have to think about it.

I wasn't sure if I'd imagined you and it'd be very telling of my mental state if I was bringing sodas to something I'd imagined.

I wish you were here,” I say, shutting my eyes and remembering the way Dad looked in my hallucination. I hear his voice again, so real that I’m worried I’m about to fall into another hallucination. Maybe that’s what I really want. If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity?

I was sane once. It was horrible.

Look ahead to the bright light Use your hopes to unfold each night Rejoice in the struggle, stay sane There’s always sunshine after rain

Longevity-and sanity. Eccentric old ladies on Harleys I can deal with.

Lust makes you insane, love gives you sanity.

Loving yourself isn’t vanity. It’s sanity.

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

Mais, vrai, J'ai trop pleure! Les aubes sont navrantes. What a sad and beautiful line that is. I'd always hoped that someday I'd be able to use it.

Messy love is better than none. I guess. I'm no authority on sane living.

Maybe he’s normal and we’re the crazy ones. Maybe everyone should talk to themselves. Maybe we’re all just afraid of what we’d say.

Mental health sufferers are not crazy. They have special insight. You better recognize that setting aside your interest people to stay asleep and show empathy towards God's imperfect creations, otherwise the world has no meaning to exist.

Minds that have withered into psychosis are far more terrifying than any character of fiction.

Millions of sane people would each be sexually attracted to their own parent or child if they were not related to them.

Most sane human beings who are over the age of six usually act or react not as per what they genuinely feel or really think but in accordance with the expectations of those around them.

Most people are just a waste of sanity.

Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them.