If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them.
The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.
Sometimes you have to go a little crazy before you can find sanity. I think I'm close.
When the whole world is crazy, it doesn't pay to be sane.
Writing is a solitary existence, especially if you forget to chat to your friends – sorry, I meant characters.
The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.
The world is too sane. It could use a little madness.
In this decaying world, these moments with her help keep me sane.
What I cannot love, I overlook.
I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything 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.
I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.
Too much sanity may be madness - and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
Some of us walk around with a necklace of hope, an armour of sanity, but at the end of the day, they always come off. We reveal our naked, vulnerable, real selves.
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
Here lies a gentleman bold
Who was so very brave
He went to lengths untold,
And on the brink of the grave
Death had on him no hold.
By the world he set small store-
He frightened it to the core-
Yet somehow, by Fate's plan,
Though he'd lived a crazy man,
When he died he was sane once more.
But maybe that isn't possible. Maybe the mind of the majority is always the healthy mind, simply by virtue of its numbers. Maybe it's the definition of madness to believe I'm right and everyone else if wrong, to find my thoughts rational and reasonable when almost the entire world finds them damaged and flawed.
At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.
If you haven’t lost your mind yet, that’s because you haven’t seen very much.
When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.
Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.
Time is not an enemy as such, but a missing person, sending cryptic postcards from the past.
At first, I didn’t understand. Understanding came very slowly.
I need a new trick if I am to walk without legs, see without eyes or speak without words.
It’s unpleasant magic, the kind that darkens the senses, the kind no one wants to experience, but once in a lifetime might not be able to avoid.
No trees, sky or ground. No other buildings or fields. No winding path, no brambles, no outhouse or pond or flowers, no sunshine or children playing. Just blackness.
Even though I knew, deep down, what she was trying to do, I couldn’t hate her. Even when she hurt me, I forgave her.
Right now, in this dusty anti-paradise, I have absolutely no hand in the future at all.
I have always hated lies; my own and everyone else’s.
I used to love lulling, running water – a sound so infrequent in cityscapes. Its loss always made me feel lonely when I lived amongst concrete.
Truth starts with a sense.
A thick rivulet of lost blood reflects a city that will mourn but never die.
Dwelling on the loneliness inherent in a city such as this when you dream of endless mountains and expanses of blue sky is a recipe for torment.
Pain is usually all on the surface, but this terror is internal; not just a hurt, but a new language of feeling.
I can't get his bones
to go down the fucking drain.
I try to stuff the tiny holes,
too tiny for this pain.
I can't get his bones
to break any way for my gain.
Break them back a little too far,
never too far for the sake of sane.
It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them.
Just because I'm insane doesn't mean I have to act all crazy.
In the 1950s at least less was expected of women. Now we're supposed to build a career, build a home, be the supermum that every child deserves, the perfect wife, meet the demands of elderly parents, and still stay sane.
I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.
Letting go is the willingness to change your beliefs in order to bring more peace and joy into your life instead of holding onto beliefs that bring pain and suffering…
I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.
The moment her hymen was plucked from her body in the wilderness,
Her soul was taken from sanity.
Nobody sane loves working in an office, It’s against human nature to be locked up in a cubicle all day long.
An idea can destroy the mind of a human being, twist it into a dark path of destruction and illness. But only the human can destroy the mind with a bullet to the soul. Ideas do not kill people; they ruin them. People kill people.
One person's craziness is another person's reality.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.
One concrete way in which we all landscape our sanity is by having our experience of reality confirmed by others. When our experience of reality is disconfirmed by others, our confidence in our own sanity can be undermined.
(page 125, Chapter 9, Graeme Galton)
Reality is a hallucination shared by most sane men.
Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.
Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.
The history of your world is filled with the voice of the victor, the voice of power, although it was not always a voice of sanity, by any means.
Once people get hung up on theology, they've lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.
Sanity is for the weak
Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.
The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.
Yet mad I am not...and very surely do I not dream.
The mountains knew the definition of freedom. They provided a place where he could find his mind.
Music is my therapy and my straitjacket. Music keeps me sane and keeps my mind on something. It's fragile up there.
The Amish are islands of sanity in a whirlpool of change.
I don't desire a change of scenery or exotic experiences. My heart yearns for familiarity, stability, the comfort of home- and my sanity depends on it.
The only sane response to change is to find the opportunity in it.
Melancholy suicide. - This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;
Minds that have withered into psychosis are far more terrifying than any character of fiction.
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
We are poor indeed if we are only sane.
[...] nobody anywhere seemed to be willing to ponder for a moment the possibility that a human being who refused to participate, who refused to speak or listen, who failed to ‘interact with his peer group‘, might not be all that crazy, and might even have arrived at an understandable response to the world in which we lived.
A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.
In any sane society, a farmer is a billion times more important than an economist.
Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity
I would much rather have my grotesque products of the imagination compared to your delusional sanity.
Where to look if you've lost your mind?
You never know what lurks just beneath the surface of my fragile sanity.
We rode in silence, I think all of us wondering what was behind the flowery wallpaper our perceptions had always pasted on the unknown. All the things the mind won't allow us to see, to protect our sanity, or our soul, or maybe just to keep the shit out of our pants.
Sanity is transmuting all the insane parts of your brain into a creative outlet.