Insanity Quotes

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other, it will unriddle many riddles, it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.

~ Mark Twain

I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it's the best available option at the time.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

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

~ Susanna Kaysen

I rolled my eyes. He's talking to himself. My vote is he's crazy. He thought about this. 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

To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been. And to protect their delicate vision of that other time, madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty, and surround it with a thousand distractive schemes. These schemes, in turn, drive them deeper and deeper into the darkness and light (which is their mortification and their reward), and confront them with a choice. They may either slacken and fall back, accepting the relief of a rational view and the approval of others, or they may push on, and, by falling, arise. When and if by their unforgivable stubbornness they finally burst through to worlds upon worlds of motionless light, they are no longer called afflicted or insane. They are called saints.

~ Mark Helprin

Never attempt to apply logic to madness, for there is none; it is the nature of madness to be illogical.

~ Navessa Allen

and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks.

~ Douglas Adams

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.

~ Zoë Heller

Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.

~ Richard Yates

Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.

~ James Lee Burke

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

You need to be clever to best him. Are you clever, Rach

~ Kim Harrison

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

~ Henry Ward Beecher

The worst thing to call somebody is crazy. It's dismissive. I don't understand this person. So they're crazy. That's bullshit. These people are not crazy. They strong people. Maybe their environment is a little sick.

~ Dave Chappelle

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

~ George Orwell

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

~ George Eliot

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

The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I'm not sure about the turnip.

~ Terry Pratchett

Everybody looks a little crazy if you're looking close enough and if you can't look that close, then you don't really love them.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

He laughed a little, in an odd, nervous kind of way. Because if I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die--and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.

~ Dodie Smith

She disappeared; her voice, her laughter, and the warmth of her breath never seen by no one again.

~ Durgesh Satpathy

He mouths something. Six words. Six words that seem too impossible to be true. Six words that bleed hope into my soul. Six words. “You’re not crazy. I love you.

~ Lauren Hammond

I said to him, Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

~ G.k. Chesterton

What a waste it is to lose one's mind.Or not to have a mind. How true that is.

~ Dan C. Quayle

Now because 18 months ago the first dawn, 3 months ago broad daylight but a very few days ago the full sun of the most highly remarkable spectacle has risen — nothing holds me back. I can give myself up to the sacred frenzy, I can have the insolence to make a full confession to mortal men that I have stolen the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make from them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt. If you forgive me I shall rejoice; if you are angry, I shall bear it; I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years; God himself has waited six thousand years for his work to be seen.

~ Johannes Kepler

I suddenly remembered that Murray Gell-Mann and I were supposed to give talks at that conference on the present situation of high-energy physics. My talk was set for the plenary session, so I asked the guide, Sir, where would the talks for the plenary session of the conference be?Back in that room that we just came through.Oh! I said in delight. Then I'm gonna give a speech in that room!The guide looked down at my dirty pants and my sloppy shirt. I realized how dumb that remark must have sounded to him, but it was genuine surprise and delight on my part. We went along a little bit farther, and the guide said, This is a lounge for the various delegates, where they often hold informal discussions. They were some small, square windows in the doors to the lounge that you could look through, so people looked in. There were a few men sitting there talking. I looked through the windows and saw Igor Tamm, a physicist from Russia that I know. Oh! I said. I know that guy! and I started through the door.The guide screamed, No, no! Don't go in there! By this time he was sure he had a maniac on his hands, but he couldn't chase me because he wasn't allowed to go through the door himself!

~ Richard Feynman

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

One of the better definitions of insanity - doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting the result to be different.

~ Anthony Kiedis

He was nuts. He'd scammed the quarterly mental health exam and was certifiably insane.Not that that's ever stopped me from sleeping with anyone.

~ Jordan Castillo Price

I'm talking to myself in two different personas now. I'm reaching for a full-throttle meltdown and why not? Why stop halfway? Why not just go for it, jump on and ride the wave?

~ C.k. Kelly Martin

Do you know why you’re here? Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you.To make you sane.

~ George Orwell

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

By all means. Swords have ever been the best servants of crazy men.

~ Piers Anthony

I watched the black ocean in his eyes and saw this flash behind them and understood what he had meant the night before, about the insanity that had gripped him. He was not so far gone as to be lost, but he was close, and I knew it had come from me turning my back on him as I had started to flee. Whether I wanted to or not, I anchored him to this world, and I was the only thing he'd known, maybe for his whole life. He had watched me, yes, he had stalked me, oh yes, but it had driven him to the edge. I inhaled sharply at the wildness I saw in him, the despair that was threatening to rise.

~ T.j. Klune

I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin.

~ Augusten Burroughs

The more sensitive the lunatic, the less able is he to resist this prying interest of the normal human being. I felt that Renée's change of key - to myself, I compared Renée to a sweet melody, a little flat despite its laborious harmonies - was approaching.

~ Colette

They look up at me and see a rich lady in maternity clothes. They don't realize I am one of them.

~ Jodi Picoult

I've been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.

~ Barack Obama

have you taken leave of your senses

~ Charles Dickens