Insanity
» “No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.”
– Aristotle
» ”There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.”
– Antonin Artaud
» ”We are all born mad. Some remain so.”
– Samuel Beckett
» ”The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one’s designs to one’s means.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
» ”Man disavows, and Deity disowns me: hell might afford my miseries a shelter; therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all bolted against me.”
– William Cowper
» ”Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.”
– T. S. Eliot
» ”Insanity destroys reason, but not wit.”
– Nathaniel Emmons
» ”I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.”
– Desiderius Erasmus
» ”A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get into accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.”
– Sigmund Freud
» ”I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”
– Allen Ginsberg
» ”Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.”
– Baltasar Gracian
» ”Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
» ”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.”
– Dennis Hopper
» ”I teach that all men are mad.”
– Horace
» ”I may be crazy but it keeps me from going insane.”
– Waylon Jennings
» ”Everyone is more or less mad on one point.”
– Rudyard Kipling
» ”Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children.”
– Samuel Levenson
» ”I’m a nut, but not just a nut.”
– Bill Murray
» ”Insanity in individuals is something rare — but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
» ”If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.”
– Peggy Noonan
» ”I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
– Edgar Allan Poe
» ”For virtue’s self may too much zeal be had; the worst of madmen is a saint run mad.”
– Alexander Pope
» ”Whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.”
– Proverb
» ”Insanity is doing the same thing in the same way and expecting a different outcome.”
– Chinese Proverb
» ”All of us are crazy in one way or another.”
– Yiddish Proverb
» ”What is madness but nobility of soul. At odds with circumstance?”
– Theodore Roethke
» ”Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. [Hamlet]“
– William Shakespeare
» ”The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.”
– Mark Twain
» ”When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
– Mark Twain
» ”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.”
– Mark Twain
» ”Only the insane have strength enough to survive. Only the survivors determine what is sane.”
– Source Unknown
» ”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.”
– Source Unknown
» ”There is no insanity so devastating in man’s life as utter sanity.”
– William Allen White
» ”You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
