Insanity quotes
497 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside insanity — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Writing sustains me. But wouldn’t it be better to say it sustains this kind of life? Which doesn't mean life is any better when I don’t write. On the contrary, it is far worse, wholly unbearable, and inevitably ends in madness. This is, of course, only on the assumption that I am a writer even when I don’t write - which is indeed the case; and a non-writing writer is, in fact, a monster courting insanity."
"If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves."
"The insanity of the collective egoic mind, amplified by science and technology, is rapidly taking our species to the brink of disaster. Evolve or die: that is our only choice now."
"Much Madness is Divinest Sense, to a Discerning Eye."
"She asked for my love and I gave her a dangerous mind."
"I was just too stubborn to ever be governed by enforced insanity."
"There is an area of the mind that could be called unsane, beyond sanity, and yet not insane. Think of a circle with a fine split in it. At one end there's insanity. You go around the circle to sanity, and on the other end of the circle, close to insanity, but not insanity, is unsanity."
"How strange to have failed as a social creature—even criminals do not fail that way—they are the law's "Loyal Opposition," so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read."
"May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: 'Sleep hath its own world', and it is often as lifelike as the other."
"I wanted to fathom her secrets; I wanted her to come to me and say: "I love you," and if not that, if that was senseless insanity, then...well, what was there to care about? Did I know what I wanted? I was like one demented: all I wanted was to be near her, in the halo of her glory, in her radiance, always, for ever, all my life. I knew nothing more!"
"... the English alphabet is pure insanity..., It can hardly spell any word in the language with any degree of certainty."
"I have hope that humanity will be cured of our collective ecological insanity and that we adapt to living within the boundaries of the laws of ecology."
"The insanity of consumption bothers me. Talk about the opiate of the masses. It ain't religion anymore. It's stuff."
"Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad."
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. A life lived for others is a life worthwhile."
"We are not ourselves When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind To suffer with the body."
"So this is what insanity is. Not goofy behavior, but watching a sudden change in the world you used to know."
"Whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes successful in show business."
"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."
"Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad."
