Quotes About Insanity

Whenever people ask me how I manage to get through this whole crazy time of being incredibly famous and sort of an icon and supposedly a role model and all of this insanity, I always cite my family and then books. I don't know what I would have done without books.

Holidays do bring out the craziness in everyone. This time of year tends to being out the insanity in otherwise normal people.

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.

If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity.

Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.

Insanity consists of building major structures upon foundations which do not exist.

It was declared by Congress that marijuana makes people insane. But . . . lawyers, defense lawyers, got the idea, OK, I can use this for an insanity defense.

Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.

You want to hear about insanity? I was found running naked through the jungles in Mexico. At the Mexico City airport, I decided I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing on takeoff. My body... my liver... okay, my brain... went.

If he were insane, however, his was a very cool and collected insanity.

Embrace beautiful lies - the chronic insanity of the sane

While it is democratically not permissible for an individual to own any information or publishing medium, all individuals have a natural right to self-expression by any means, even if such means were insane and meant to prove a person's insanity.

Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.

Religion is insanity by consensus.

Most people live uncomplicated lives. They have work and quietly rear their children. There is an order and sanity about them that keeps the world going. There is an outer disorder and insanity about my life which makes me a victim. One of the disorders is that they won't give us citizenship here.

Genius is one of the many forms of insanity.

Creativity has two possibilities. One is that it arises out of your silence, love, understanding, your clarity of vision, your intimate friendliness with existence - then creativity is healthy. But if it does not arise out of meditation, out of silence and peace and understanding and love, then there is a danger. It may be arising out of your confused mind. It may be arising out of your insanity.

One of the marvels of personality is its resistance to prediction. One man's paralyzing trauma is another man's invitation to take control of his life; one woman's grounds for insanity is another woman's ground to a dramatic shaping of self.

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

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.

We know exactly where the path to despair and insanity lies. It's in that sense that life is meaningless, there's nothing about today that's worth doing because it's just like yesterday and it's going to be just like tomorrow.

That's the nice thing about insanity: evil people kill you, but crazy ones try to make you understand.

Unfortunately, Susan didn't remember what Jane Fulton once said, 'Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.

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.

'Insanity... I like it."

. . . the fools of this world prefer to look for sages far away. They don't believe that the wisdom of their own mind is the sage . . . the sutras say, "Mind is the teaching." But people of no understanding don't believe in their own mind or that by understanding this teaching they can become a sage. They prefer to look for distant knowledge and long for things in space, buddha-images, light, incense, and colors. They fall prey to falsehood and lose their minds to insanity.

Insanity is arguing with reality.

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

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 utter insanity of living in a place like this doesn't occur to the 9,000,000 people who inhabit New York. Except for visits I think I shall not be here any more as a resident.

War, to sane men at the present day, begins to look like an epidemic insanity, breaking out here and there like the cholera or influenza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels.

I am told that the clinical definition of insanity is the tendency to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.

but ignorance is a kind of insanity in the human animal. People who delight in torturing defenseless children or tiny creatures are in reality insane. The terrible thing is that people who are madmen in private may wear a totally bland and innocent expression in public.

The whole notion of politics is they always present you with this or this or this. I’ll get a newspaper to read between the lines. Why do you have to adhere to prescribed formulas that they have and people argue over them and they’re all in a box. And you watch Fox claw CNN, and CNN claw Fox. Sometimes I catch a piece of the news and it seems insanity to me. I quietly support candidates. I’m not out there banging a drum for candidates. But I have supported a candidate and it’s a whole other world.

War...seems a mere madness, a collective insanity.

No, I won't leave the world--I'll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn't I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum--don't you think I may end up there?

I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. I doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo but drawing circles through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.

When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; ... he learns his ignorance, is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.

Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.

Sex, drugs, and insanity have always worked for me, but I wouldn't recommend them for everyone.

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.

Being alone onstage is like legalized insanity.

Anger is a choice, as well as a habit. It is a learned reaction to frustration, in which you behave in ways that you would rather not. In fact, severe anger is a form of insanity. You are insane whenever you are not in control of your behavior. Therefore, when you are angry and out of control, you are temporarily insane.

It would be quite amusing to preach a bit to all those people who for many years now have been looking at our paintings and either laughed or shook their heads reproachfully. They do not believe that these impressions, these instant sensations, could contain even the smallest grain of sanity. If a tree is red or blue, or a face is blue or green, they are sure that is insanity.

My mum is in a mental hospital. There's a fine line between genius and insanity. Winston Churchill, Mozart, John Lennon. These people all had a touch of crazy that fuelled their brilliance. They were not locked up for it like my mum. Pft. Then again, Winston Churchill never tried to kill my dad.

A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.

We stalk the truth as poets, sensualists, a duality, limited insanity. We labor in our muse, carving alphabets of experience into our hearts.