Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
G.K. CHESTERTON, "On the Classics," Selected Essays
Sanity ... had it ever been more than a convention -- a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?
- Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness.
- And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.
Sanity becomes the fantasy that keeps us sane; a rhetorical prop in an unplotted, threatening world.
ADAM PHILLIPS, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness
The one impulse in man which cannot be erased is his impulse toward freedom, his impulse toward sanity, toward higher levels of attainment in all of his endeavors.
L. RON HUBBARD, Dianetics 55!
Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.
JEAN DEBUFFET, New Yorker, Jun 16, 1973
Rational behavior ... depends upon a ceaseless flow of data from the environment. It depends upon the power of the individual to predict, with at least a fair success, the outcome of his own actions. To do this, he must be able to predict how the environment will respond to his acts. Sanity, itself, thus hinges on man's ability to predict his immediate, personal future on the basis of information fed him by the environment.
ALVIN TOFFLER, Future Shock
In dreams the mind is constantly giving you substitutes just to protect sleep. And the same is happening while you are awake. The mind is giving you substitutes just to protect your sanity; otherwise you will be scattered in fragments.
OSHO, The Book of Secrets
- Where sanity is
- there God is.
Sanity is not statistical.
GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-Four
The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality -- to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting -- but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail. It is as if to say: if these are not valued -- if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing -- are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.
ADAM PHILLIPS, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
GEORGE SANTAYANA, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
WALLACE STEGNER, Little Giant Encyclopedia of Inspirational Quotes
Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be!
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, Don Quixote
- If we lose our sanity ...
- We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots,
- the howl of the utterly lost
- howling their nowhereness.
The sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Nominalist and Realist," Essays
One of the definitions of sanity, itself, is the ability to tell real from unreal. Shall we need a new definition?
ALVIN TOFFLER, Future Shock
ALEISTER CROWLEY, Diary of a Drug Fiend
- Sanity brings pain
- but madness is a vile thing.
Illusion is sometimes all that keeps us sane.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON, The Killing Dance
Of all the things I've lost, it's my mind I miss the most.
OZZY OSBOURNE, quoted in Foolish Words: The Most Stupid Words Ever Spoken
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