I dig old books. ™
Est. 1998
 | ||
Home About Contact Terms Privacy |
Quotations about
Sanity and Insanity
INSANITY is inseparable from cerebral imperfection; and seeing cerebral imperfection occurs in every individual, therefore insanity is the fate of all the human race. ~Arthur Trevelyan, "The Insanity of Mankind," 1850
What price — sanity? The struggle to keep it was too great... ~Jane Hillyer, Reluctantly Told, 1926
It needs no maxims drawn from Socrates
To tell me this is madness in my blood.
~Arthur Davison Ficke, Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter, 1914
He's got a screw loose. It's hardware he needs. ~Hughes Mearns, Richard Richard, 1916
Pardon my sanity... in a world insane... ~Emily Dickinson, 1856
It is better to be a little mad than commonplace. ~Victor Cherbuliez, Samuel Brohl and Partner, 1877, translated from French
And just when the mind might snap and go sane... ~Thomas McGrath, "Poor John Luck and the Middle Class Struggle, Or: The Corpse in the Bookkeeper's Body," The Movie at the End of the World: Collected Poems, 1972
Madness is defined in different ways at different times, sanity being the knack of keeping current. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Sanity can never, on any occasion, deviate from reason; and as no one is at all times rational (so called), therefore are all mankind insane, often
Great Wits are sure to Madness near ally'd;
And thin Partitions do their Bounds divide...
~John Dryden, "Absalom and Achitophel," 1681
The madman thinks the rest of the world crazy. ~Publilius Syrus, 1st century BCE, from the Latin by D. Lyman, 1856
His madness foiled his reason... ~Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897
Might we not say to the confused voices which sometimes arise from the depths of our being, "Mesdames, be so kind as to speak only four at a time"? ~Madame Swetchine, translated by H. W. Preston
His mens was not completely sana. ~Arthur Guiterman, "Rhymed Reviews: The Enchanted Canyon by Honoré Willsie," in Life, 1921
A man who is “sound of mind” is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key. The state of sanity and normality are determined by a certain physiological pretense, by make-believe. ~Paul Valéry, translated by Stuart Gilbert
...a taste of exquisite madness... ~Rev. James H. Ecob, "Instantaneous Photographs," 1895
Hatter: Have I gone mad?
Alice: Afraid so. You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret — all the best people are.
~Alice in Wonderland, 2010, screenplay by Linda Woolverton, inspired by Lewis Carroll novels from the mid-1800s
"Cheshire... Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to walk from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to go," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where—" said Alice... "—so long as I get somewhere..."
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough... In that direction... lives a Hatter: and in that direction... lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. ~Mark Twain
We walk a narrow strip all our days between Madness and Sanity... ~James Oppenheim, "Abyss," Golden Bird, 1923
Today I felt pass over me a breath of wind from the wings of madness. ~Charles Baudelaire
A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King...
~Emily Dickinson
The first time I see you laugh at an insane man's doings I shall mark you down as a lesser physician, for you don't understand the human drama. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
We are all of us, therefore, more or less idiots; and... so are we all more or less insane... ~H. G. Atkinson, 1844
After all, what the insane most need is a friend! ~Anonymous psychiatrist, c.1908
Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions to a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant and has escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being "out of their senses," when they have in fact fallen back into them; or of those who have "lost their mind," when they have lost merely that habitual control over consciousness which prevented it from flaring into all sorts of obsessions and agonies. ~George Santayana, "The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men," Little Essays Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana, with the collaboration of the author, by Logan Pearsall Smith, 1921
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled. ~George Santayana
...the place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum... When the gods, to ruin a man, first make him mad, they do it, almost invariably, by making him an optimist. ~Havelock Ellis, "The Art of Thinking," The Dance of Life, 1923
That night I slept little. At midnight I awoke. I could not think. I started a train of ideas which finished itself or got lost in a tangle of cross associations. I simply had to lie there and let it; I could not direct its course at all. I tried again and again, patiently and slowly. A terror gripped me. I sat up as if pulled into position by cold, invisible ropes. My breath came in gasps. I jumped to my feet. By a faint light I saw a figure reflected in the mirror. The face looked out from under knitted brows. I knew definitely that the figure in the mirror was mad. I was mad. ~Jane Hillyer, Reluctantly Told, 1926
There is always a madness in love. There is, however, also always a reason in madness. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Alexander Tille
If you took a cracked pot and you cracked that cracked pot, you'd be approaching the level of cracked pottery we are talking about here. ~Rachel Maddow, 2011, MSNBC
Victor Hugo was a madman who believed himself to be Victor Hugo. ~Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
Temporary madness may be necessary in some cases, to cleanse and renovate the mind; just as a fit of illness is to carry off the humours of the body. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw. ~William Shakespeare, Hamlet, c.1600 [II, 2, Hamlet]
...in practically all cases of insanity, the sense of humor seems to be completely lacking. ~H. A. Overstreet, About Ourselves: Psychology for Normal People, 1927
To suffer and be silent, that is all.
To shut one's teeth and hold one's aching breath...
For by-and-by insanity will aid:
Lunacy takes me from the world of men.
One shock more, and my brain has toppled. Then
I crave no more for light, since all is shade.
~John Gould Fletcher, "The Descent into Hell," Visions of the Evening, 1913
Yes, I have been haunted! — haunted so fearfully that for some little time I thought myself insane. I was no raving maniac... To all appearance I was one of the sanest of the sane; and yet all the while I considered myself the victim of such strange delusions that, in my own mind... I was, in real truth, a madman. ~J. Sheridan Le Fanu, "The Spirit's Whisper," A Stable for Nightmares, 1896
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if any thing 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
I did it, you see, and it's my own soul that's bleeding to death. Mad words, you think, old man! Nothing could be mad enough, bad enough, to describe what is going on in here, what I am, what I have become! ~Agnes Sweetman Castle and Egerton Castle, The Haunted Heart, 1915
But in things that respect the feelings, no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions! ~Henry Ward Beecher
Insanity in individuals is something rare — but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule. ~Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Helen Zimmern
A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are. ~William Ellery Channing
I had fallen out of my world. ~Jane Hillyer, Reluctantly Told, 1926
It's like the craziest patient at the insane asylum running the place because he's the most "qualified." ~Terri Guillemets
There is a Pleasure sure
In being mad, which none but Mad-men know!
Let me indulge it, let me gaze for ever!
~John Dryden
If you are physically sick, you can elicit the interest of a battery of physicians; but if you are mentally sick, you are lucky if the janitor comes around. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
Sanity is very rare: every man almost & every woman has a dash of madness, & the combinations of society continually detect it. See how many experiments at the perfect man. One thousand million, they say, is the population of the globe. So many experiments then. Well a few times in history a well mixed character transpires. Look in the hundreds of persons that each of us knows. Only a few whom we regard with great complacency, a few sanities. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal, 1838
Brain storms, bah! It is my belief that the alienists for the defense are crazier than the defendant, whose insanity they profess to establish. ~Otto E. A. Schmidt, "The Death Clinic," in Weird Tales: The Unique Magazine, 1924
Insanity is the state of being unable, any longer, to be just a little bit delusional. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
Look both ways before entering the insanity. ~Terri Guillemets
I wonder if these people are crazy. The article said that insanity is greatly on the increase among the fashionable women of America. I wonder if I've struck some kind of a sanitarium. ~J. S. Murphy, "Hobson's Choice," in The American Literary Reciter, compiled by Richard Linthicum, 1902
All human rules are more or less idiotic, I suppose. It is best so, no doubt. The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials. ~Mark Twain
Then how the thrusts of thirst and hunger flew!
How shafts of torture ran my body through!
My eyes sank in; my purple lips did burst,
My swollen tongue bled with the raging thirst.
My reason drooped, then I went insane,
While taunting devils plucked and gashed my brain.
~Ellsworth R. Bathrick, Beauty on Ice: A Thrilling Tale of a Ruined Realm, 1899
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom... Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine... Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion... The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. it is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. ~G.K. Chesterton, "The Maniac," 1908
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a raise. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
All my life I've been trying to fit insane pieces into the puzzle of sanity. Or maybe the other way around. ~Terri Guillemets
Why, no one is sane, straight along, year in & year out, & we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, & express themselves in various forms — fortunately harmless forms as a rule — but in whatever form they occur an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us distinctly over the sanity-line for a little while... ~Mark Twain
Insanity is hereditary. You can get it from your children. ~Sam Levenson [quoteinvestigator.com]
And yet, being mad, I am not mad alone:
Alight you come...
~Arthur Davison Ficke, Sonnets of a Portrait-Painter, 1914
...are you mad? ~William Shakespeare
Home About Contact Terms Privacy | ||
|
www.quotegarden.com/sanity.html
Last saved 2025 Jan 23 Thu 16:53 CST