Sanity Quotes

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

~ Charles Dickens

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

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

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

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

~ Jim Butcher

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

~ Terry Pratchett

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

~ Alexander Thol

Reality is a hallucination shared by most sane men.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

~ Anne Lamott

Craziness is just a varying degree of sanity.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

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

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

~ Paulo Coelho

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

[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

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

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

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

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

~ Robert Frost