Quotes About Sanity

Every isolated passion, is, in isolation, insane; sanity may be defined as synthesis of insanities. Every dominant passion generates a dominant fear, the fear of its non-fulfillment. Every dominant fear generates a nightmare, sometimes in form of explicit and conscious fanaticism, sometimes in paralyzing timidity, sometimes in an unconscious or subconscious terror which finds expression only in dreams. The man who wishes to preserve sanity in a dangerous world should summon in his own mind a parliament of fears, in which each in turn is voted absurd by all the others.

Live in robust sanity, in holy obedience to the ordinary." (The Message) "In an insane asylum like the world, simple sanity can be a heroic achievement.

Sometimes I think that it is enough to say that if we don't sit down and shut up once in a while we'll lose our minds even earlier than we had expected. Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.

If mankind is to profit freely from the small and sporadic crop of the heroically gifted it produces, it will have to cultivate the delicate art of handling ideas. Psychology is now able to tell us with reasonable assurance that the most influential obstacle to freedom of thought and to new ideas is fear; and fear which can with inimitable art disguise itself as caution, or sanity, or reasoned skepticism, or on occasion even as courage.

My grandmother had the most dramatic effect on my life because she set me in one direction, and I had to go back the other direction for my sanity, and for my ability to be a social human being.

The worst things in history have happened when people stop thinking for themselves, especially when they allow themselves to be influenced by negative people. That's what gives rise to dictators. Avoid that at all costs. Stop it first on a personal level, and you will have contributed to world sanity as well as your own.

As a man I am not a killer. I’m an artist and a modern person. I’ll choose sanity.

A question I often get is, "How do you maintain your sanity with so much happening all around you?" I think I developed a certain mental toughness that is required in the business. You have to have a thick skin and a brass bottom, because you're going to kicked a lot.

It's really scary when you have a moment of temporary sanity.

We must, I believe, start teaching our children the sanity of nonviolence much earlier.

At the end of the day, it's important to know what really matters most in life...your sanity, your health, your family, and the ability to start anew.

When I was a child in the Navy during World War II, I was perennially grateful to the armed services libraries for having on hand a good supply of those pocket books, which were so common in that period. I must have read a couple hundred of them, and they did a lot to save my sanity.

How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination.

You don't think I'm crazy?" I asked hesitantly. "Like I'm one to judge another persons sanity.

Sanity is a matter of culture and convention. If it's a crazy culture you live in, then you have to be irrational to want to conform. A completely rational person would recognize that the culture was crazy and refuse to conform. But by not conforming, he is the one who would be judged crazy by that particular society.

He who can simulate sanity will be sane.

The measure of mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job.

Sometimes becoming drug free has less to do with addiction and more to do with sanity.

We are insane. That is what sin is. Sanctity is identitical with sanity. It means living the truth, living in reality. Sin always substitutes unreality for reality.

Sanity is not statistical.

Religion is a valid inquiry; whether society accepts it or rejects it, it doesn't matter. Man is a religious animal and is going to remain that way. Religion is something natural. To ask from where you come is relevant; to ask, 'Who am I?' is going to remain relevant always. But the modern mind has created a climate of atheism so you cannot ask such questions. If you ask, people laugh. If you talk about such things, people feel bored If you start inquiring in these ways, people think you are slipping out of your sanity. Religion is no longer a welcome inquiry.

There is a madness, yes, this is true. Few mortals possess it, the willingness to step away from the protection of sanity. To walk into the wild wood of madness...

Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.

Public opinion, though slow as lava, in the end forces governments towards more sanity, more justice. My heroes and heroines are all private citizens.

it will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. this is true. unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks can not be saved. or anything else worth a damn. wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. for my own part i would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.

Passion does not blind. No. Passion is sanity, and the woman you love, she is the only person you will ever really understand.

Never fear, inevitably we shall have our years of failure, and when they arrive, we must reveal tolerance and sanity. No matter the days of anxiety that come our way, we shall emerge stronger because of the trials to be overcome.

how can he love me then not? He went,he ran. And I cannot bring him back. Yet I left the door metaphorically wide open, hoping he'd come back and bang on it proclaiming, "I want to be here with you. Always." Soon I'm going to have to shutit. For my safety and my sanity. Let go. I don't want to. Won't letting go be just that - letting go? Giving up? Admitting failure? Admitting that it is really, truly over?

World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Nonviolence is a good starting point. Those of us who believe in this method can be voices of reason, sanity, and understanding amid the voices of violence, hatred, and emotion. We can very well set a mood of peace out of which a system of peace can be built.

I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place.

I've had a lot of things rendered as not being effective or as some indication of my lack of sanity, only to be praised ten, fifteen, twenty years later for what I did once in this overt consciousness.

Trust yourself. At the root, at the core, there is pure sanity, pure openness. Don’t trust what you have been taught, what you think, what you believe, what you hope. Deeper than that, trust the silence of your being.

The cost of sanity in this society, is a certain level of alienation

Long ago they lowered insane persons into snake pits; they thought that an experience that might drive a sane person out of his wits might send an insane person back to sanity.

If ruling our world stems from developing certainty in our sanity, how do we discover it? The Shambhala teachings instruct us to "put our mind of fearfulness in the cradle of loving-kindnes."

Sanity? Sorry, I don't ever remember having something like that before.

I wish you'd help me look into a more interesting problem - namely, my sanity.

Wolves? I should have known. Of course you have wolves. Doesn’t everybody?” She snapped her fingers. “The gun, Lucian. Hand it over. I’ve decided I have to shoot you after all. It’s the only way to preserve my sanity.

Yes. To write a novel is to risk my sanity. The deeper I get into the suffering and conflict of the characters, into the very situations and thoughts and feelings that make the novel worthwhile, the worse I feel, and the more likely I am to be severely depressed when the book is finished. There is no avoiding this: it is the result of attempting to tell all you know, to reach for the stars, to write what matters.

My dark comic edge is the end result of trying to use humor to maintain my sanity growing up in a dysfunctional family in Honolulu.

Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.

It wouldn't make for sanity would it, living with the devil.

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.

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 the most profound moral option of our time.

She should have remembered her past experiences in the relationship wars and not let herself get so excited. Evidently her hormones had overruled her common sense and she had become drunk on ovarian wine, the most potent, sanity- destroying substance in the universe.

She took a deep breath, looking up at the ceiling for a long moment. A raindrop moved slowly down her neck; he watched as it turned down the slope of her breast to disappear inside the collar of her shirt. He was seriously contemplating becoming jealous of a droplet of water. Yorkshire was obviously damaging to his sanity.

There is no insanity so devastating in man's life as utter sanity.