Top 100 Madness Sanity Quotes
#2. She realized then that madness and sanity were two worlds separated from each other by no more than a single step.
Dean Koontz
#3. Trap yourself inside your own brain, switch off the light, block all the escape routes, then turn your back on everything you know to be reality and try and survive there. Try. Living. Nowhere.
Carla H. Krueger
#4. Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
George Santayana
#5. I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.
Michel Foucault
#6. In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.
R.D. Laing
#7. In a world that thought itself so wise yet behaved so stupidly, it was possible sometimes to believe that only the mad saw matters as they truly were, that only people like my brother were prepared to admit what they saw from the corner of their eye.
Robert Goddard
#8. If you learn to look at the worldly madness through spiritual eyes, you will begin to see divine balance and sanity.
Bryant McGill
#9. It's a madness so discreet that it can walk the streets and be applauded in some circles, but it is madness nonetheless.
Mindy McGinnis
#10. He preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.
D.H. Lawrence
#11. We all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity. The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity?
G.K. Chesterton
#12. 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 ...
Neil Gaiman
#13. If a drunkard in a sober fit is the dullest of mortals, an enthusiast in a reason-fit is not the most lively. And this, without prejudice to his greatly improved understanding; for, if his elation was the height of his madness, his despondency is but the extreme of his sanity.
Herman Melville
#14. The madness was gone, but now I knew the torment of sanity. My
Rhiannon Frater
#15. It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.
Robert Hughes
#16. The first part of madness is believing what you hear. The Second is acting on it.
Sam Hawksmoor
#17. Once upon a time there was a
Once upon a time there was a
Once upon a time there was a
Stop this. It's undignified.
N.K. Jemisin
#18. Logic is illogical, madness is seeing the truth for what it is, which is sanity. therefore I am the most illogical sane person you will ever meet. ;)
Shannon Neprily
#19. To remain sane in a mad world is the true victory.
Marty Rubin
#20. I really believe," said Wanda thoughtfully,"that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane.
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
#21. We all talk to ourselves. Those we call mad just talk a little louder.
Marty Rubin
#22. One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness
Anne Lamott
#23. If I can only see him in madness, is it worth trying to hold onto sanity?
Beth Revis
#24. Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying hard enough.
John Irving
#25. Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the fine line between sanity and madness gotten finer?
George Price
#26. To stay sane in a mad world is the real victory.
Marty Rubin
#28. From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is not "true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves.
R.D. Laing
#29. I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity
Grant Morrison
#30. Between madness and sanity, there is a shifting boundary. It is impossible to explain. Time slows down and you have to try to fill it. You don't have anything but solitude.
Jose Mujica
#32. Sanity brings pain but madness is a vile thing.
Euripides
#33. If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.
Alain De Botton
#34. And what would they find on sale? His sanity? Could be. Half-Price. Smoke and Water Damage. Everything Must Go.
Stephen King
#36. The world is too sane. It could use a little madness.
Cameron Jace
#37. Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.
Rohinton Mistry
#38. For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.
Joyce Carol Oates
#39. Silence must be comprehended as not solely the absence of sound. It is the natural environment for serenity and contemplation. Life without silence is life without privacy. The difference between sanity and madness is the quality of our thoughts. Silence is on the side of sanity.
Norman Cousins
#40. I swam across the torrent of my madness, and pulled myself upon the shore of a new and better sanity.
Frances Hardinge
#41. The cab driver is staring at me in his mirror. I'm talking to myself.
"The second sign of madness," I explain.
"What's the first one?"
"Killing lots of people and eating their genitals."
He laughs and sneaks another look at me.
Michael Robotham
#42. Christ," he said to the tiny reflection of himself that floated along the surface of his coffee,
"You have become quite the maudlin sop, haven't you? Laughing softly, he rubbed a hand over his face.
Step one on the road back to sanity, stop talking to yourself.
Kristen Callihan
#43. Somewhere between sanity and madness lays a fine line, for some it is a tightrope walked daily, a fight for balance to be won or lost. That fight is lost one of two ways. Some simply lose their balance and fall, others are pushed.
Zoe Heller
#44. She is madness,
sanity. She is hell, and
paradise.
Ellen Hopkins
#47. I love you Contessa, Your madness is silent and your sanity makes a racket. Now is the time for madness.
C.D. Reiss
#48. You are mad, Malloreigh!" It is an odd thing to have madness call you mad. Makes you think for a moment that you are sane, but also makes you think that it is truly sane. My mind hurts. I stopped thinking. I painted.
D.J. LeMarr
#49. Sometimes, to regain sanity, one had to acknowledge and embrace the madness.
Morgan Rhodes
#50. Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#51. That's an incredibly depressing thought," I said "that if you're in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity it is human nature to veer towards the madness end.
Jon Ronson
#53. How pregnant sometimes his replies are. A happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.
William Shakespeare
#54. People who detest their sanity love to tell you they are insane, authors included...and all for a few bucks. Their charlatan madness is masturbation.
W.T. Shad
#55. Time is not an enemy as such, but a missing person, sending cryptic postcards from the past.
Carla H. Krueger
#56. If you haven't lost your mind yet, that's because you haven't seen very much.
Yasmina Khadra
#57. I've recently begun to believe that love is synonymous with madness. It can't possibly be an act of sanity. It is restless and always in pursuit. It will fall from the sky to have what it wants.
Lauren DeStefano
#58. But I like my madness. There is a thrill in it unknown to such sanity as yours. ~ Book 1, Chapter 9,
Rafael Sabatini
#59. The human race will last. Everywhere and forever, for it will never be sane and only insanity is divine. Only the mad destroy themselves and all they have wrought.
And only the phoenix lives forever.
Fredric Brown
#60. Healing from childhood abuse is not going mad, it is going sane.
Jan Hawkins
#61. Madness is like an alternative residence. When sanity chases you out of home, take shelter in madness.
Munia Khan
#62. That in you which recognizes madness as madness (even if it is your own) is sanity, is the arising awareness, is the end of insanity.
Eckhart Tolle
#63. He was happy because, after such a long study, experimentation, and struggle, he could at last affirm the ultimate truth: there never were and never would be any madmen in Itaguai or anywhere else.
Machado De Assis
#64. MADNESS Madness is the first step towards unselfishness. Be mad and tell us what is behind the veil of "sanity." The purpose of life is to bring us closer to those secrets, and madness is the only means. SP-ST-62
Kahlil Gibran
#65. Too much sanity may be madness - and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
Dale Wasserman
#66. Your madness is silent and your sanity makes a racket.
C.D. Reiss
#67. The mountains of madness have many little plateaux of sanity.
Terry Pratchett
#69. When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.
George Bernard Shaw
#70. Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.
John Russell
#71. Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn't know. That's why he was devouring two or three books a day - to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life.
Philip Roth
#72. Much Madness Is Divinest Sense
Much Madness is divinest Sense
To a discerning Eye
Much Sense - the starkest Madness
'Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail
Assent - and you are sane
Demur - you're straightway dangerous
And handled with a Chain -
Emily Dickinson
#73. Sanity is found at the centre of convulsion, where madness is scorched
from the bisected soul.
Sarah Kane
#74. Every great genius has an admixture of madness.
Aristotle.
#76. Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
Virginia Woolf
#78. She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.
Anthony Trollope
#79. One intriguing way to enter into the battle between good and evil, life and death, sanity and madness, is in the pages of fiction.
Robert Poe
#80. But my foster mother never explained to me that there can be a deep loneliness in modern sanity too. That madness can be its own form of solace.
Diana Abu-Jaber
#81. To some extent, sanity is a form of conformity. People are always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering. But it's really not so simple. I think mental illness or madness can be an escape also.
John F. Nash
#82. Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity. I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent.
Machado De Assis
#83. He had found in himself the perfect, undeniable case of insanity. He possessed wisdom, patience, tolerance, truthfulness, loyalty, and moral fortitude - all the qualities that go to make an utter madman.
Machado De Assis
#84. It is impossible for the sane to truly understand madness.
Lance Conrad
#85. Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.
Douglas Adams
#86. I prayed for death so as not to live in madness.
Andrew Krivak
#87. I had better admit right away that walking can in the end become an addiction ... even in this final stage it remains a delectable madness, very good for sanity, and I recommend it with passion.
Colin Fletcher
#88. It's maybe impossible to escape (your own head), but I guess the secret is the prison cell just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and prettier and prettier and prettier.
David Lynch
#89. In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too
Saul Bellow
#90. Certainly, Gandhi is not inferior to Christ in goodness and sanctity, and he surpasses him in touching humility. Gandhi is the prophet of hope in this age of pessimism and disillusionment. He is a promise of sanity in the madness induced by our world's heedless drinking at the fount of war.
Sudhir Kakar
#91. How much is real and for how long..
J. Limbu
#92. My parents and their world represented a return to sanity and predictability, something I was longing for after all this madness.
Ransom Riggs
#93. In every society, the definitions of sanity and madness are arbitrary - are, in the largest sense, political.
Susan Sontag
#94. Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#95. She saw him like he was the only star in the whole damn sky. Like he was the only bridge between her sanity and madness.
Akshay Vasu
#96. Up is down, pleasure is pain, darkness is light, slavery is freedom, madness is sanity ...
Anton Szandor LaVey
#97. I finally realized that I had to embrace the madness, let it transform me instead of letting it define me.
....
"You, my ferocious girl, are embracing the madness. Lean into it, won't ya?
R.L. Haas
#98. No, thanks. I'm busy being an island of sanity in a sea of utter madness.
Maggie Stiefvater
#100. Life, this endless conversation with yourself. Silent in sanity, audible in madness.
Zohra Sehgal
