Insanity Quotes
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Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.
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More Insanity Quotes
Every hand and every hour should be devoted to rescue the world from its insanity of guilt, and to assuage the pangs of human hearts with balm and anodyne. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.
horace mann— Lecture 6
One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of doing so is evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper.
louis antoine de saint-just— On ne peut point régner innocemment : la folie en est trop évidente. Tout roi est un rebelle et un usurpateur.
— Sur le jugement de Louis XVI (1er discours), speech to the National Convention (November 13, 1792).
Now we are forced to recognize our inhumanity Our reason coexists with our insanity And though we choose between reality and madness It's either sadness or euphoria.
Billy Joel— Summer, Highland Falls
The self-deceived person may even think he is able to console others who became victims of perfidious deception, but what insanity when someone who himself has lost the eternal wants to heal the person who is extremely sick unto death!
— Works of Love, Hong p. 7
The craft is finding a decent drainpipe to get access to the site as much as it is in the art... Van Gogh used short, stumpy brush strokes to convey his insanity – I use short, thin ledges above mainline train tracks.
Banksy— Evening Post 2004 (taken from "Home Sweet Home - Banksy's Bristol" by Steve Wright)
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.
Herman Melville— 1891Billy Budd, Foretopman (first published1924), ch.21.
Our neighborhood - this solar system, the cosmos, actually - is so much more vast and amazing than the paltry headlines, insanity, and politics crammed at us daily as so-called news. The beauty of the hood and discoveries that await us are deserving of our attention and mandatory to our survival as a species.
vanna bonta— Vanna Bonta on the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. BonNova | X PRIZE Foundation official
This is a story of a period between two World Wars — an interim in which insanity cut loose. Liberty took a nose dive, and humanity was kicked around somewhat.
charlie chaplin— Opening placard
The captain, thinking over this event afterward, realized that by his own lifelong standards he had a crew composed entirely of lunatics, with himself well to the front in degree of aberration; but he was fairly sure that this particular form of insanity was going to be useful.
hal clement— Chapter 9 (Mission of Gravity (1954))
Look, I learned from your uncle that when the universe turns out to be insane, the wise man embraces insanity.
bradley denton— pp. 213-214 (Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede (1991))
The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye.
ralph waldo emerson— The Conduct of Life, Behaviour
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.
— As quoted in Words from the Wise : Over 6,000 of the Smartest Things Ever Said (2007) by Rosemarie Jarski, p. 312
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.
murray leinster— Chapter 4 (p. 45)
Genius is one of the many forms of insanity.
cesare lombroso— As quoted in Born under Saturn: the character and conduct of artists : a documented history from antiquity to the French Revolution (1963) by Margot Wittkower
The elements are now reversed. It is no longer the end of time and of the world which will show retrospectively that men were mad not to have been prepared for them; it is the tide of madness, its secret invasion, that shows that the world is near its final catastrophe; it is man’s insanity that invokes and makes necessary the world’s end.
— Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
In an individual one would regard it as evidence of insanity to see someone repeatedly undertaking enterprises that resulted in his losing precisely what he claimed he was trying to achieve; it is not less lunatic to do it on the international scale, but if you’ve been catching the news lately you’ll have noticed it’s being done more than ever.
john brunner— context (11) “Come Outside and Say That”
Lucretius was passionate, and much more in need of exhortations to prudence than Epicurus was. He committed suicide, and appears to have suffered from periodic insanity – brought on, so some averred, by the pains of love or the unintended effects of a love philtre.
lucretius— Bertrand Russell, in A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Book I, Part III, Chapter XXVII, The Epicureans, p. 248
The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity.
errol morris— Source: Radiolab episode "The Fact of the Matter"
To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.
anaïs nin— August 1932 Henry and June
He was insane with anger. Or is all insanity anger?
anaïs nin— The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)
Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much."
anaïs nin— The Diary Of Anais Nin, Volume Two (1934-1939)
Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder. This disease is prevalent only among civilized races living under artificial conditions; barbarous nations breathing pure air and eating simple food enjoy immunity from its ravages. It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.
— Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil's Dictionary.
In women, courage is often mistaken for insanity.
— Doctor in Iron Jawed Angels.
There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
— Oscar Levant, as quoted in Celebrity Register : An Irreverent Compendium of American Quotable Notables (1959) by Cleveland Amory ; also paraphrased as "There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line".
The alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye.
ralph waldo emerson— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, Conduct of Life. Of Behaviour.
insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
ray bradbury— The Meadow (1947), originally a radio play for the World Security Workshop; later revised into a short story for this anthology.
Men’s immediate path from the insanity Track to the Sanity Track is in demanding that both sexes have the freedom to strike a balance between homeplace and workplace. Men must expect their wives to financially support them to be fathers as much as they now financially support their wives to be mothers. Women must have our approval to marry the warrior of love rather than the warrior of money.
warren farrell— p. 212. (Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex)
insanity a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
ronald david laing— As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 412; this might be a paraphrase, as the earliest occurrence of this phrase thus far located is in the form: "Ronald David Laing has shocked many people when he suggested in 1972 that insanity can be a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world." in Studii de literatur? român?i comparat? (1984), by The Faculty of Philology-History at Universitatea din Timi?oara. A clear citation to Laing's own work has not yet been found.
