Quotes About Insanity

One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.

And the council doesn’t recognize any kind of temporary insanity defense. Which was a real shame, because most of the councilmen had considered me crazy for most of my life.

Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is, in this sense, a hospital.

What are we afraid of? We're afraid of the truth. We're pretending that we live in a democracy, and we're pretending we're free. The insanity is that we live inside of the false stories that we tell each other.

Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there were many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, and it did now, too.

Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love - from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behaviour of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.

Psychiatry's a young science. Yesterday's madman may be tomorrow's genius. Beethoven and Van Gogh were both a bit loopy. In my view, most madmen are remarkable. They're explorers, travelers beyond the rim of consciousness. Not surprising if they pick up a few bugs and get sick. That's all it is, madness. Mad just means sick. If you get fluid on the lungs it's pleurisy. If it's fluid on the brain, it's insanity.

I think insanity is the hardest thing to play.

Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

I'm simply saying that there is a way to be sane. I'm saying that you can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes. It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness.

Terrorism isn't insanity. It grows out of social conditions that are well known: poverty, social oppression, dictatorship, and a void of meaning in the lives of ordinary people.

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

To rush to throw away your magazine business and move it on the iPad is just sheer insanity and insecurity and fear.

I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing with the same result over and over again, expecting something different. The left just spent how many months trying to destroy Donald Trump, trying to impugn Donald Trump with every weapon they had, with every trick in their book, every tactic that has been successfully used by the media to destroy Republican candidates over the years. It's in their playbook. They brought it all out. Every bit of it blew up in their face; all of it failed. And yet they continue with the same tried and true and worn-out techniques to discredit Trump.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

Death is the great wrecking ball that destroys everything. Everything that we have done, everything that we are doing now, and all our plans for the future are completely and irrevocably destroyed when we die. Only teenagers live in that state of temporary insanity when they believe themselves immune from death.

Poetry is the purest form of insanity.

Unity is what we are afraid of so fear is insanity. Let’s love each other.

Careful with the accusations of insanity, oh my lady whose home is a tower with windows of brick, all for the sake of some skinny-ankled, laugh-prone boy of a khan.

War is a sin. War is the highest degree of immorality. War is inhuman insanity for it kills sacred human lives wholesale. How can there still be any war on our miraculous planet?

war is a ferocious form of insanity. Nothing can justify it.

I do have my concerns for mankind as a species. Way I see it, humans are in transition. Accelerating at f**king light speed into some new insanity, and no one really knows how it's going to turn out.

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

You need messiness and magic, serendipity and insanity. Creativity comes from time off, and time out.

I've had my moments of insanity. But there is a certain responsibility to set proper examples for your children, and that influences your choices in every aspect of your life.

You don't have to be sincere yourself to recognize sincerity when you see it. Any more than you have to be insane to recognize insanity.

One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of doing so is evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper.

Was Luther crazy? Perhaps. But if he was, our prayer is that God would send to this earth an epidemic of such insanity that we too may taste of the righteousness that is by faith alone.

I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.

One thing's for sure. If we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to keep getting what we're getting. One definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect different results.

The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell - in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.

Genius is a curse. That's how I look at it. Some think that the brilliant comprehend the universe in a way the rest of us can't. They see the world how it truly is—and that reality is so horrible the lose their minds. Clarity leads to insanity.

I attributed the incidence to temporary insanity, and in my own defense, I'd like to say I haven't run over anyone since.

The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.

One of the reasons MSNBC is plummeting is that I, not long ago, refused to play any content from them. I figured, why? I mean, it's genuine depraved partisan politics insanity, genuine extremist radical ignoramuses on that network.

It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane.

We have battled in America since the century's turn to bring to nothing any and all Christian influences and we are succeeding. While we today seem to be kind to the Christian, remember we have yet to influence the 'Christian world' to our ends... You must work until 'religion' is synonymous with 'insanity'... It is only necessary to work incessantly upon the official, using personal defamations, wild lies, false evidences and constant propaganda to make him fight for you against the church or against any practitioner.

There are people who want me to do a cologne. They want to call it 'Patrick.' I was offered a fortune to make exercise videos. Posters, all kinds of stuff - something like $10 million worth. It's insanity. I'm not going to do any of it.

Fear is not real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity Kitai. Do not misunderstand me, danger is very real, but fear is a choice.

The step between genius and insanity is very short.

It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that’s the sin that can’t be forgiven--that I hadn’t done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there’s no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain--and wasted pain...why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage.

Einstein wrote that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That said, is it crazier to repeatedly throw yourself against a window, or to repeatedly open that window, believing the creatures that are throwing themselves against it might come into your house, take a look around, and leave with no hard feelings?

It was a symptom of the insanity of human beings in a cosmos obviously designed for them to live in, but which they industriously prepare to make unlivable.

Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity in doubt.

When you realize that there's a name and a description for this condition that you thought was insanity, you've identified the problem, and now you can do something about it.

He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this; had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles.