Sanity Quotes

One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Mark Twain

Madness is part of all of us all the time and it comes and goes waxes and wanes.

Otto Friedrich

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

Sigmund Freud

Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.

George Santayana

Outside among your fellows among strangers you must preserve appearances a hundred things you cannot do but inside the terrible freedom!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sanity is very rare every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Mad bad and dangerous to know.

Lady Caroline

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

Samuel Beckett

There is a pleasure sure In being mad which none but madmen know!

John Dryden

The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great bestsellers.

V.S. Pritchett

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

Arthur Miller

[Solitary confinement] is terrible. That is terrible. You're in a grave. You can't do anything. Everything's brought to you and you're in a room all day, except to come out of the showers. So when I would come out, I would entertain myself by singing, doing little mock concerts. And then when I was in the room, I would develop a routine. Like I have a lot of hair under here, so I would take my hair down and take all day to braid it on purpose. Stretch the hours out. Then I might write. And I would clean the floor. And I would look out the window. And then I'd devote a whole day to just reading. I was Christian then, trying to be. So I would read the whole Bible. I would break it down into sections. You're in a grave and you're trying to live. That's how to best describe it: trying to live in a grave. You're trying to live 'cause you're not dead yet, but nobody hears you when you call out, 'Hey, I'm alive!

Megan Sweeney

Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly, It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.

Nevada Barr

Sanity is for the weak

Uke family motto

People are all crazy... but the craziest are the ones who never allow themselves to be crazy.

Paulo Coelho

You aren’t crazy,’ he says. ‘What?’ ‘I’ve known you all your life, and you’ve always tried to hide the parts of yourself that you think are wrong. But nothing is wrong with you.’ Those may be the best words he’s ever said to me.

Lauren DeStefano

Craziness is just a varying degree of sanity.

Anthony T.Hincks

... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]

Anne Lamott

Reality is a hallucination shared by most sane men.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Sanity is an illusion. Created by the minds of people who fear the wicked.

Alexander Thol

Gossiping's part of witchcraft,' said Tiffany. 'They're checking to see if they've gone batty yet.

Terry Pratchett

Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.

Jim Butcher

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

If I was crazy, would I know it? That's what being crazy was, wasn't it? You thought you were fine. Everyone else knew better.

Kelley Armstrong

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.

Mercedes Lackey

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

Just because I'm insane doesn't mean I have to act all crazy.

Diana Rowland

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

Philip Larkin

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.

Tomichan Matheikal

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

Charles Dickens

People who smoke would have probably been regarded as fools or insane, if only a percentage of people who smoke smoked.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I was sane once. It was horrible.

Michael R. Fletcher

As long as she could remember who she was, she was okay. She wouldn't go crazy. At least not today.

Melissa de la Cruz

Sanity exists only in books, while Insanity rules our lives!

Ramana Pemmaraju

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.

Katie Kacvinsky

See what I mean? You gotta be crazy. Ain't no time to be sane.

Robin McLaurin Williams

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

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.

Hermann Hesse

Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

Susanna Kaysen

Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.

John Irving

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on the proper occasions."Henry Ward Beecher

Henry Ward Beecher

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

George Eliot

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Edgar Allan Poe

I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane.

Neil Gaiman

Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded...

Edgar Allan Poe

The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!

Salvador Dalí

One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Nikola Tesla

No sane person resists the smell of the soil when sprinkled with water,Especially the smell of the intercourse between earth and rain.

Nomthandazo Tsembeni

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?

Beth Revis

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.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

…gender is not sane. It's not sane to call a rainbow black and white.

Kate Bornstein

...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.

Aleister Crowley

Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it.

Aldous Huxley

Everybody knows there is no such thing as normal. There is no black-and-white definition of normal. Normal is subjective. There's only a messy, inconsistent, silly, hopeful version of how we feel most at home in our lives.

Tori Spelling

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.

Alessandra Hazard

I say, thirteen is too many dogs for good mental health. Five is pretty much the limit. More than five dogs and you forfeit your right to call yourself entirely sane.Even if the dogs are small.

E. Lockhart

She wasn't about to go down that road herself, which was a testament to her spiritual awakening and her commitment to sanity. It was a real blessing that she didn't follow me, because oftentimes, people go out together and one comes back and the other doesn't. Or both of them never do.

Anthony Kiedis

I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.

Rabih Alameddine

Your own brain ought to have the decency to be on your side!

Terry Pratchett

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Sanity Quotes

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