Insanity Quotes

Plato believed that insanity was essential to our nature and assumed that it held esoteric knowledge about who we are.

~ Michael Greenberg

I rehearsed Foucault's argument that the presence of madness on our doorstep is good for us, for it reminds us the life we live is only one among several human possibilities.

~ Michael Greenberg

I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity

~ Grant Morrison

One of them hasn't got a uniform on or plainclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas.The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying.(New York Blues)

~ Cornell Woolrich

Are you crazy? It's a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not want to cross it again.

~ Susanna Kaysen

Am I cured?” “No. You’re someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness.” “Is wanting to be different a serious illness?” “It is if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. It’s a distortion of nature, it goes against God’s laws, for in all the world’s woods and forests, he did not create a single leaf the same as another. But you think it’s insane to be different, and that’s why you chose to live in Villete, because everyone is different here, and so you appear to be the same as everyone else. Do you understand?” Mari nodded. “People go against nature because they lack the courage to be different, and then the organism starts to produce Vitriol, or bitterness, as this poison is more commonly known.

~ Paulo Coelho

Emotions rage inside me, something like a world war twisting inside my stomach and poking holes in my lungs. I can't pick apart reality from fantasy - does that mean insanity isn't far from my reach?

~ K. Weikel

Her purse was a weight, ballast; it tethered her to the earth as her mind floated away.

~ Anne Lamott

This damn ring had derailed her life. No wonder Gollum had gone insane.

~ Karina Bliss

I wondered if perhaps I'd gone mad. I had known this man less than twenty-four hours and already I wanted to raise his children.

~ Lucy Robinson

I believe at least in one of the chief tenets of the Christian faith--contentment with a lowly place. I am a doctor and I know that ambition--the desire to succeed--to have power--leads to most ills of the human soul. If the desire is realized it leads to arrogance, violence and final satiety; and if it is denied--ah! if it is denied--let all the asylums for the insane rise up and give their testimony! The are filled with human beings who were unable to face being mediocre, insignificant, ineffective and who therefore created for themselves ways of escape from reality so to be shut off from life itself forever.

~ Agatha Christie

Finding love should not cause you to lose your mind.

~ Amanda Mosher

The prince of darkness is a gentleman!

~ William Shakespeare

Now, I would say to myself, you are feeling alienated from people and unlike other people, therefore you are projecting your discomfort onto them. When you look at a face, you see a blob of rubber because you are worried that your face is a blob of rubber.This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn’t see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.

~ Susanna Kaysen

Out of his zestful study of Man, from Thucydides to the Encyclopaedists, from Seneca to Rousseau, he had confirmed into an unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his own species.

~ Rafael Sabatini

a detestable, viscous place populated by slugs

~ Paul Majkut

Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?”“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter

~ Lewis Carroll

First sign of madness, talking to your own head.

~ J.k. Rowling

In a mad world, only the mad are sane.

~ Akira Kurosawa

Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.

~ Rohinton Mistry

The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.

~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.

~ Charles Baudelaire

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it... he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.

~ Donald Barthelme

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

~ Rudyard Kipling

One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness

~ Anne Lamott

There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we're lucky we're Odysseus tied up to the ship's mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we're not at all lucky, we're another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea.

~ Caitlín R. Kiernan

Once upon a time there was aOnce upon a time there was aOnce upon a time there was aStop this. It's undignified.

~ N.k. Jemisin

Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing.

~ Penelope Fitzgerald

It's madness, of course', thought Moist. 'But now I've got it, too.

~ Terry Pratchett

Madness is born in the blood. It is my birthright.

~ Grant Morrison

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

~ Sam Hawksmoor

He's no idiot, in fact he's a genius... and that's as far from an idiot as you can get without reaching madness.

~ Mike Judge

Emotions had welled close to the surface, and she thought her heart had never felt so full as it did standing next to the defiled grave of a whore while lunatics sang the national anthem.

~ Mindy Mcginnis

His own naivety taunted him like a flicker of madness.

~ Jane Harper

And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go.

~ Stephen King

It is impossible for the sane to truly understand madness.

~ Lance Conrad

Nowadays I just don’t care; I’ve taken the Frank Zappa stance. I am who I am! Some love me, some loathe me, some respect me and some despise me. But after all that’s been, I still love the insane! As they’re exciting, dangerous and highly explosive! For me mad dogs are gentlemen.

~ Stephen Richards

Fuck the rabbit, eat it and go after a lion.

~ Stephen Richards

I went through a period where I couldn’t keep off the establishment’s roofs, it was a serious urge I had. To look at a drainpipe and start shaking with excitement, nobody knows the feeling of hitting a prison roof, not unless you’ve done it. Let me tell you, it’s like a lotto win - it’s power. You’re the governor; it’s a kick in the teeth to the system.

~ Stephen Richards

So what causes men to become violent? I’ll tell you, boredom, silly rules, muggy screws and pathetic governors. What else can we do - swallow it, wipe our mouths out. You have to fight for your rights. Not sit back and take it.

~ Stephen Richards