c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Do you know what the definition of insane is? Yes. It’s the inability to relate to another human being. It’s the inability to love.
— Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.
— James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending
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, The World According to Garp
You need to be clever to best him. Are you clever, Rach
— Kim Harrison, Pale Demon
No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on the proper occasions."Henry Ward Beecher
— Henry Ward Beecher
The worst thing to call somebody is crazy. It's dismissive. "I don't understand this person. So they're crazy." That's bullshit. These people are not crazy. They strong people. Maybe their environment is a little sick.
— Dave Chappelle
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
— George Orwell, 1984
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
I wish you'd help me look into a more interesting problem - namely, my sanity.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Welcome to the Monkey House
Maybe he’s normal and we’re the crazy ones. Maybe everyone should talk to themselves. Maybe we’re all just afraid of what we’d say.
— Katie Kacvinsky, Awaken
See what I mean? You gotta be crazy. Ain't no time to be sane.
— Robin McLaurin Williams
The only really sane person in there is Igor, and possibly the turnip. And I'm not sure about the turnip.
— Terry Pratchett, Making Money
Everybody looks a little crazy if you're looking close enough and if you can't look that close, then you don't really love them.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Romance
Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally.
— Philip K. Dick
He laughed a little, in an odd, nervous kind of way. "Because if I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die--and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
She disappeared; her voice, her laughter, and the warmth of her breath never seen by no one again.
— Durgesh Satpathy, Equating the Equations of Insanity: A Journey from Grief to Victory
Seems to me that there is a fine line between insanity and dedication…I call that line commitment
— Jeremy Aldana
He mouths something. Six words. Six words that seem too impossible to be true. Six words that bleed hope into my soul. Six words. “You’re not crazy. I love you.
— Lauren Hammond
This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here.
— Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
It is a proven fact that everyone on this earth has some bit of madness within their soul. I am no exception and neither are you.
— Matthew Hunt
What a waste it is to lose one's mind.Or not to have a mind. How true that is.
— Dan C. Quayle
Now because 18 months ago the first dawn, 3 months ago broad daylight but a very few days ago the full sun of the most highly remarkable spectacle has risen — nothing holds me back. I can give myself up to the sacred frenzy, I can have the insolence to make a full confession to mortal men that I have stolen the golden vessel of the Egyptians to make from them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt. If you forgive me I shall rejoice; if you are angry, I shall bear it; I am indeed casting the die and writing the book, either for my contemporaries or for posterity to read, it matters not which: let the book await its reader for a hundred years; God himself has waited six thousand years for his work to be seen.
— Johannes Kepler, Harmonies Of The World
I suddenly remembered that Murray Gell-Mann and I were supposed to give talks at that conference on the present situation of high-energy physics. My talk was set for the plenary session, so I asked the guide, "Sir, where would the talks for the plenary session of the conference be?""Back in that room that we just came through.""Oh!" I said in delight. "Then I'm gonna give a speech in that room!"The guide looked down at my dirty pants and my sloppy shirt. I realized how dumb that remark must have sounded to him, but it was genuine surprise and delight on my part. We went along a little bit farther, and the guide said, "This is a lounge for the various delegates, where they often hold informal discussions." They were some small, square windows in the doors to the lounge that you could look through, so people looked in. There were a few men sitting there talking. I looked through the windows and saw Igor Tamm, a physicist from Russia that I know. "Oh!" I said. "I know that guy!" and I started through the door.The guide screamed, "No, no! Don't go in there!" By this time he was sure he had a maniac on his hands, but he couldn't chase me because he wasn't allowed to go through the door himself!
— Richard Feynman
To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. (“The Medusa”)
— Thomas Ligotti
One of the better definitions of insanity - doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting the result to be different.
— Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue
He was nuts. He'd scammed the quarterly mental health exam and was certifiably insane.Not that that's ever stopped me from sleeping with anyone.
— Jordan Castillo Price, Secrets
I'm talking to myself in two different personas now. I'm reaching for a full-throttle meltdown and why not? Why stop halfway? Why not just go for it, jump on and ride the wave?
— C.K. Kelly Martin, My Beating Teenage Heart
Do you know why you’re here? Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you.To make you sane.
— George Orwell, 1984
As long as she could remember who she was, she was okay. She wouldn't go crazy. At least not today.
— Melissa de la Cruz, The Van Alen Legacy
By all means. Swords have ever been the best servants of crazy men.
— Piers Anthony, Castle Roogna
I watched the black ocean in his eyes and saw this flash behind them and understood what he had meant the night before, about the insanity that had gripped him. He was not so far gone as to be lost, but he was close, and I knew it had come from me turning my back on him as I had started to flee. Whether I wanted to or not, I anchored him to this world, and I was the only thing he'd known, maybe for his whole life. He had watched me, yes, he had stalked me, oh yes, but it had driven him to the edge. I inhaled sharply at the wildness I saw in him, the despair that was threatening to rise.
— T.J. Klune, Burn
I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin.
— Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors
The more sensitive the lunatic, the less able is he to resist this prying interest of the normal human being. I felt that Renée's change of key - to myself, I compared Renée to a sweet melody, a little flat despite its laborious harmonies - was approaching.
— Colette, The Pure and the Impure
They look up at me and see a rich lady in maternity clothes. They don't realize I am one of them.
— Jodi Picoult, Second Glance
I've been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.
— Barack Obama
have you taken leave of your senses
— Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
We never end up with the book we began writing. Characters twist it and turn it until they get the life that is perfect for them. A good writer won't waste their time arguing with the characters they create...It is almost always a waste of time and people tend to stare when you do!
— C.K. Webb
The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
When you realize that there's a name and a description for this condition that you thought was insanity, you've identified the problem, and now you can do something about it.
— Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue
When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.
— Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine
In our national parlance, what's usually meant by the word "maverick" is someone who skirts the edge of sanity--or is so insane as to appear sane--who then does something absolutely insane and yet, after the passage of time, and especially if the maverick's creation yields a profit of any kind, is deemed less and less insane until the maverick worms his or her way into the fibers of history. Then generations grow to envy the ingenuity and courage of the maverick while glossing over the maverick's genetic kookiness. On such shoulders, a country rises.
— Michael Paterniti, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain
I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
If he had to spend the evening with madwomen, he would prefer at least one of them be willing to let him grope her.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Danse Macabre (Night's Dream, #2)
Sanity exists only in books, while Insanity rules our lives!
— Ramana Pemmaraju
When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.
— Stephen King, The Mist
Insane people give me hope.""What!!!!" I almost dropped my beer."The insane have decided to stay on," Crumley said. "They love life so much that, rather than destroy it, they go behind a self-made wall to hide. Pretend not to hear, but the do hear. Pretend not to see, but see. Insanity says: I hate living but love life. Hate the rules but do like me. So, rather than drop in graves, I hide out. Not in liquor, nor in bed under sheets, nor in a needle's prick or snuffs of white powder, but in madness. On my own shelf, in my own rafters, under my own silent roof. So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sand and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.
— Ray Bradbury, A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities
He’s lost it. Our son is insane. Or on drugs. Or maybe not on enough drugs.
— Ransom Riggs, Library of Souls
...and it's that time of the day when the fatigue sets in. No, not the physical type of fatigue that goes with a stretching of limbs or a session in my sauna ~which in fact is sparkling signifying it's existence for sheer aesthetics rather that practical use!It was that mental fatigue , when my soul was exhausted and weary; that I needed a shot of Gatorade;just to calm my nerves,stopping me from hallucinationsand let me fall asleep!
— BinYamin Gulzar
...and it's that time of the day when the fatigue sets in. No, not the physical type of fatigue that goes with a stretching of limbs or a session in my sauna;which in fact is sparkling signifying it's existence for sheer aesthetics rather that practical use!It was that mental fatigue , when my soul was exhausted and weary; that I needed a shot of Gatorade;just to calm my nerves,stopping me from hallucinationsand let me fall asleep!
— BinYamin Gulzar
The cruel truth exposes the ugly side of us so deeply that we find solace in the last defence hiding behind the facade of our insanity.
— BinYamin Gulzar
It is nearly impossible to make a psycho attached to you. Once you are successfully his attachment, never aback from that. If you ever aback, it is obvious that you have forgotten that the person is a psycho.
— Awsaaf Ali
This is kind of insane, isn't it?" I asked. "I've only known you for a few days.""Five days. Six days if you include today." His blue eyes met mine, our foreheads still touching. "It's not insane. Insanity is a state of mind which prevents normal perception and/or behaviours."I chuckled at his clinical reply, but he pulled back so he could see my face properly and shrugged. "Jack, what I perceive of you, and how I've conducted myself in your company is with full mental cohesion." His cheeks stained with colour. "And Einstein would have you believe that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." He bit his lip and laughed at himself, I think. "But I don't want different results. I wouldn't change a thing.
— N.R. Walker, Imago
I regard the USA mass population routinely flip-flopping between the Republican and Democratic parties as a form of insanity.
— Steven Magee
To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
— Lewis Carroll
Creating conflicts and killing each other to be in accord with our only Creator should be the definition of insanity.By promoting divisions and hostility among men, all monotheisms have proven that they are nothing but banal manners of clan formation.
— Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
Insanity is when you keep doing something that does not work
— Sunday Adelaja
The young man was sort of ... well ... peering at this shovel, and Lisey knew not by his face but by the whole awkward this-way-n-that jut of his lanky body that he didn't have any idea what he was seeing. It could have been an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for spare silver; it could have been a whang-dang-doodle, a phylactery testifying to the pompetus of love, or a cloche hat made out of coyote skin. It could have been the penis of the poet Pindar. This guy was too far gone to know.
— Stephen King, Lisey's Story
In her unworldly voice she thanked them for finally understanding her. She reminded me of a female pirate captain alone on the deck of her sinking ship.
— Raymond Radiguet, The Devil in the Flesh
A part of me expects more of my only sister....Dorothy has always been exactly who she is, and for me to hope for anything better reminds me of a quote attributed to Einstein: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Dorothy is predictable. She does the same thing repeatedly and expects not a different result but the same one she got the last time she did whatever she wants with little regard for anyone else. So maybe she's the sane one....
— Patricia Cornwell, Chaos
People who would refuse to share their bread shared their insanity instead.-Three Daughters of Eve
— Elif Shafak
Spirals.... this town is contaminated with spirals.
— Junji Ito, Uzumaki, Vol. 1
People who smoke would have probably been regarded as fools or insane, if only a percentage of people who smoke smoked.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?He thought, It is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn't it. I don't know; I sense it, I intuit it. But -- they are purposelessly cruel... is that it? No, God, he thought. I can't find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction : race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, hounor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time.
— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Loving someone is very different from the heady feeling of being "in love," which is, frankly, just temporary insanity.
— Barton Goldsmith, The Happy Couple: How to Make Happiness a Habit One Little Loving Thing at a Time
is he crazy?" --Harcourt-Brace editor on Holden Caulfield
— J.D. Salinger
Once I Knew A Lovely Psychiatrist.I Always Thought She Had The Worst Patients.P. Hermans
— Petra Hermans
You need a little bit of insanity to do great things.
— Henry Rollins
I was sane once. It was horrible.
— Michael R. Fletcher, Beyond Redemption
When I look at you as if you're crazy it's not that I judge you for your insanity.
— Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Kiss
Burnout…occurs because we’re trying to solve the same problem over and over.
— Susan Scott
A psychologist would probably diagnose insanity for a nation that spends more on its military than the next 8 nations combined, while its poor are starving.
— Steven Magee
At night I locked my bedroom door, because [my father] could not sleep and would insist on talking to me, endlessly, without making sense. But there was a small window over the door which could not be locked. One night I woke up to see him slithering through the tiny aperture and jumping nimbly to the floor. But he paid no attention to me. He aimlessly picked up various pieces of heavy mahogany furniture and let them drop with seemingly little effort. In his insanity he had become superhumanly agile and powerful. Staying with him was a nightmare.
— Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
I think I will drink my hemlock now....
— Tracy Groot, Madman
I wondered whether I had gone insane. If so, I thought, then this is what it feels like; I would never have guessed the world would still appear so sharp and vivid, the streets the same, the clouds the same, nothing different except your mind has come unhinged, its cogs whirling loose and wild and hazardous.
— Carolina De Robertis, Perla
all you had to do was to keep your insanity undercontrol
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
The greywastes was a basin overflowing with insanity, the very earth underneath me was only surviving because it was too mad to know it had died
— Quil Carter, Fallocaust
Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption.
— Siri Hustvedt
The fun thing about insanity is that it is often so very hard to tell it apart from brilliance.
— Evan Currie, Heirs of Empire
I have to admit, insanity is so much fun.
— Cameron Jace, Insanity
What slave work do you want me to do for you?” asked Diogenes when he had been bought.“Be a teacher to my children,” answered Xeniades with the insanity that matched the wisdom of Diogenes.
— Tomichan Matheikal, The Nomad Learns Morality
If I died, I’d expect my guy to mourn me forever, and if he tried to hook up with someone else, I’d haunt him till he ended up in a crazy house. Then I’d haunt the girl.
— Gena Showalter, The Harder You Fall
You know what insane people are, Alice?" the Pillar says. "They are just sane people who know too much.
— Cameron Jace, Insanity
Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?
— Charles Dickens
Insanity is a gradual process - don't rush it.
— Douglas Adams, The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide
Are you insane?” she’d replied. “Yes.” Jeoff didn’t even bat an eye as he admitted it.-Arabella & Jeoff
— Eve Langlais, When a Beta Roars
I’ve been an inmate in Broadmoor, Rampton and Ashworth. I was one of ‘them’. I was once Britain’s most unstable madman! This book is a complete one off! If you’re a nervous type of reader then don’t read it. You’ve been warned! You are now entering the world of insanity; please keep hold of your sanity until the book comes to a stop!
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
No, it didn't hurt. He didn't want to lose any black hair, and he was careful to pull out the white hairs one by one. But when he had finished, the skin was drawn and shriveled. It hurt when you ran your hand over it, the doctor said. It didn't bleed, but it was raw and red. Finally he was put in a mental hospital. . . He didn't want to be old, he wanted to be young again. No one seems to know whether he started pulling it out because he had lost his mind, or he lost his mind because he pulled out too much.
— Yasunari Kawabata
Insanity is nothing more than ordinary.
— Caitlyn Paige
If someone tells you you're crazy enough times, eventually it becomes true. It's that old psychiatrist's joke: insanity's all in your head.
— Madeleine Roux, Asylum
If there's a better definition of love than mutual benevolent insanity, I haven't heard it.
— Leah Raeder, Cam Girl
Freedom without discipline is foolish, discipline without freedom is insanity.
— Ilona Mialik
Human beings have speculated about the relationship between inspiration and insanity for centuries.
— Patty Duke
There is no reason why an individual, who has the misfortune to become insane, should, on that account, be deprived of any comfort or even luxury...
— Thomas Story Kirkbride
There is already enough chattering nonsense on the ground. Do we really need aviaries in pressurised tin cans at 30,000 feet as well ?
— Alex Morritt, Impromptu Scribe
Wonderland was wonderful, but without a counterbalance, it could turn it's inhabitants completely insane. 
— Marie Hall, Her Mad Hatter
That's what everyone forgets these days: there's a fine line between sanity and insanity. Lots of people are on the edge. We can't be in perfect balance all the time.
— Poppy Adams
Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous form of insanity.
— Robert Graves, Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina
Stay insane, but behave like normal people. Run the risk of being different, but learn to do so without attracting attention. Concentrate on this flower and allow the real "I" to reveal itself.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
True insanity, as frightening as it might be, gives a sort of obliviousness to the chaos in a life. People who commit suicide are struggling to order their existence, and when they see it's a losing battle, they will finalize it rather than have it wrenched from them. Insanity wouldn't permit that type of clarity.
— Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills
The ordinary lunatic is generally a harmless, isolated case; since everyone sees that something is wrong with him, he is quickly taken care of. But the unconscious infections of groups of so-called normal people are more subtle and far more dangerous.
— C.G. Jung, The Integration of the Personality
She disappeared; her voice, her laughter and the warmth of her breath never seen by no one again.
— Durgesh Satpathy
Eblis said, "No man who thinks ill, will hear the truth despite a hundred signs.When one who fantasises is presented with reason his fantasies increase.When one talks to such a person, their words become the very cause of that person's fantasy. The crusader's sword is a tool for a thief.So the response to him is silence and peace; to talk with an idiot is insa
— Jalaluddin Rumi, The Great Satan "Eblis"
So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.
— Ray Bradbury, A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities
Men who leave their mark on the world are very often those who, being gifted and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of insanity.
— Francis Galton
We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.
— Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment
The conquered roam free in the box of insanity.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?
— Edgar Allan Poe
What a thing it is to have music that plays your terrible thoughts. I imagined that one piece could drive more delicate women than myself to insanity.
— Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here
Alema said, 'Are you mad?'Ship thought it probably was, since it was beginning to take liking to her, but that was beside the point. The Emperor-to-Be was trying to break free; all they needed to do was open a hole for him.'Us and what f
— Troy Denning, Inferno
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.
— Erasmus
Sometimes I notice I'm demented, especially at sunset.
— Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk
Just because I'm insane doesn't mean I have to act all crazy.
— Diana Rowland, My Life as a White Trash Zombie
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
— Philip Larkin
But if love can be funny and capricious, it can also be strong enough to seem like a sign of insanity.
— Chelsey Philpot
But what defines insanity , really !? Is it your mind or the mind of the person making the judgment !? Because all of us , no matter who you are , can go insane sometimes ! There are times when we either know too little or too much. The unknown can be scary place , but the known can be even more frightening
— weyhey_harry, Psychotic
He didn't seem conventionally insane in any way that I could understand. But there was no way of comprehending him. In some eerie and fundamental way, he didn't appear to belong to our world. But that didn't seem the same as being mad.
— Marcel Theroux, Strange Bodies
Insanity is not a fit topic for high-school children.
— Allan Dare Pearce, Hitler Burns Detroit
People are crazy and times are strange,I'm locked in tightI'm out of range,I use to carebut things have changed.
— Bob Dylan
I know all about insanity. It's not that bad once you beat up everyone who teases you about it.
— Eve Langlais, A Demon and His Witch
The need to document my insanity is an affliction I have not yet cured myself of...
— Lydia Lunch, Incriminating Evidence: The Collected Writings of Lydia Lunch
People who were perfectly sane on Tuesday sometimes go nuts on Wednesday.
— Dean Koontz, Prodigal Son
If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
— George Orwell, 1984
For just a second, Lauren wonders if she’s going insane. But insane people don’t think they’re insane, everybody knows that. But...since that fact of insanity is common knowledge, doesn’t that mean an insane person could use it to convince themselves they’re not actually insane? Wouldn’t that make them even more insane?
— Patrick Anderson Jr., Quarter Life Crisis
Barbee had wondered about insanity, sometimes with a brooding dread - for his own father, whom he scarcely remembered, had died in the forbidding stone pile of the state asylum. He had vaguely supposed that a mental breakdown must be somehow strange and thrilling, with an exciting conflict of horrible depression and wild elation. But perhaps it was more often like this, just a baffled apathetic retreat from problems grown too difficult to solve.
— Jack Williamson, Darker Than You Think
You can only drive yourself crazy if you have no distance from the world
— Suki Kim, The Interpreter
Yes," Mustapha Mond was saying, "that's another item in the cost of stability. It isn't only art that's incompatible with happiness; it's also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
...[I]f I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die---and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
Barbee had always wondered about mental institutions. He thought of taking notes for a feature story on this adventure at Glennhaven, as the evening wore on, began to seem remarkable for utter lack of anything noteworthy. It began to appear as a fragile never-never land, populated with timid souls in continual retreat from the real world outside and even from one another within.
— Jack Williamson, Darker Than You Think
Anyhow, many people in the soft sciences are prone to be wrong because they’re crazy** some are dumb, too, but that’s another story.
— Gregory Cochran
I do not want to be labeled as an atheist; I do hate religions’ stupidity and insanity, but there is nothing else I can be called.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
And indeed, if Eugene Iretnev was mentally deranged when he committed this crime, then everyone is similarly insane. The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.
— Leo Tolstoy
She had always enjoyed the carte blanche accorded to mobsters, aristocrats, circus clowns, and lunatics
— Simon Doonan, Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints
Horace’s eyes get wide, and he glances between me and the house. “Every time I think I got a grip on this crazy shit going on in your head, I realize I don’t know the half of it, do I?”My eyes tracing the red trim of the house, I shake my head. “Not even close.
— Erica Cameron, Sing Sweet Nightingale
This is insanity!""No, this is scholarship!
— Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance
A strong and brave heart isn’t enough. A true heart, no matter how much the truth hurts, is the strongest of all.
— Cameron Jace, Insanity
I cannot bear to associate with the ordinary run of people. I have to surround myself with individuals who for the most part are more than a trifle insane
— Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring
Sometimes, it takes just a moment of insanity to decide the course of our whole life.
— Bhaskaryya Deka, The Unwanted Shadow
it was enough just to free the words so that the voices in her head were stilled.
— Kate Morton, The Distant Hours
But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool, soaked through with the sweet chloroform of utter sadness. - Ward 9
— Will Self, The Quantity Theory of Insanity
It's true,' replied Doris with a sniff in Bessy's direction to make her sensible of a victory, even if a minor one. 'It is amazing how so many people go insane. One day a man is a normal, friendly husband and the next he suddenly becomes a raging schizoid and slays his wife and himself as well. The result of what cause? Why, perhaps he chanced to find some schoolgirl treasure of another beau who had been his greatest rival and is stunned to discover that she secretly retains this. But usually the matter is not so simple, you know. Next to nothing may happen, jarring awake some sleeping monstrosity in a man's complex mental machinery and turning him from a sane person to a mentally sick individual. It is wholly impossible to say when a man is sane, for' -she tittered- 'scarce one of us is normal.''You mean - it might happen to any of us?''Of course,' said Doris, charmed by all this interest. 'One moment we are seated here, behaving normally and the next some tiny thing, a certain voice, a certain combination of thoughts may throw out the balance wheel of our intellects and we become potential inmates for asylums the rest of our lives. No, not one of us knows when the world will cease to be a normal, ordinary place. You know, no one ever knows when he goes insane: He supposes it is the world altering, not himself. Rooms become peopled with strange shapes and beings, sounds distort themselves into awful cries and, poof! we are judged insane.''Poof -' said Jacob, feeling weak and ill.("He Didn't Like Cats")
— L. Ron Hubbard
Treat life as a suicide mission, take on the impossible jobs and attack with the gusto of someone who has nothing to lose.... and when you revel in victory, make like it's a dirty win
— Josh Stern, And That's Why I'm Single: What Good Is Having A Lucky Horseshoe Up Your Butt When The Horse Is Still Attached?
You see, there's a theory current you're insane, or you lean strongly in that direction.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Fear brings your mind to the edge of insanity, where everything is so frighteningly crystal clear you can take in every little thing that’s happening around you. Your body runs purely on adrenaline, with not a drop of blood pumping through your veins.
— Michelle Horst, Wake Me Up
Insanity is a disease, and it is highly contagious.
— Emil Ostrovski, The Paradox of Vertical Flight
Ridcully sighed.'All right, you fellows,' he said. 'No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who's playing silly buggers?'The other senior wizards stared at him.'I, I, I don't think we can play it any more,' said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, 'I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces...
— Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man
This madman must be stopped.
— Dianne Harman, Blue Coyote Motel
Because we are limited in our knowledge, even the sanest of us are slightly insane. Our limitations are a kind of madness, and we can only choose to deny we are mad, and so descend into a dark spiral of total insanity, or accept we are mad and embark on a quest to regain our true and wholesome sanity
— Dwight Longenecker, The Romance of Religion: Fighting for Goodness, Truth, and Beauty
I was never attracted to big things―convertible Porsche's, mansions, fame, and money. I always found those things to be repulsive and energy-draining. Give me the gutters, the junkyards, the bars, the liquor stores, the grimy graffiti-ridden back alleys, the insane asylums, the pimps, the hookers, the preachers, the old, the drunkards, the junkies, the homeless, the madmen, and the madwomen. Wherever the ghetto is, that's where life is. It doesn't matter where you live, United States, United Kingdom, Sweden, you won't find a liveliness like in the ghetto anywhere else. They're the things that refill my energy tank and keep me going. Anything out of that realm is just plain, dull, and boring. Give me the cheap and effortless lifestyle. The factory job, the small one-bedroom apartments, the whores, the Budweiser six-packs, the hand-rolled cigarettes, the Tom Waits vinyls, and the old vintage typewriters. I'll be alright.
— Robert Nemerovski
Acid gave me a clinical, unblinking look at madness, and I discovered I wasn't brave enough to be insane.
— Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
Stupor, insanity, and curling up with a good book.” Bright finished his coffee and slipped out of bed. “And I was wondering last night how I would fill my time today. Let me get dressed and have a spot of breakfast first.
— Lita Burke, Old Bony Blue Eyes
Who was this girl alone so late at nightin search of a faded cassette illusion to disembowel the clocks of time’s intrusion? Those eyes belonged to the most beautiful maniac I’ve ever met. Our love is a vine of entrails that can follow any coffin anywhere, no matter how deep any gravedigger might travel.
— Nicholaus Patnaude, First Aide Medicine
There is madness in every single being, is there not?
— Delia Winters, Live&Witching
So we gave the afternoon some sanity after all and I wonder, Uncle Andrew, is life sane, as we tried to make it? Or is it insanity, as it was yesterday on the Gerard plantation? And why don't more people try to make it sane?Or if it is full of sanity for them, why do they try to rip that sanity to pieces and impose their form of insanity? Can you help me understand?
— Ann Rinaldi, The Letter Writer
You could string a hundred endless days together,My soul would find no comfort from this pain.You laugh at my tale? You may be educatedBut you haven’t learned to love till you’re insane
— Jalaluddin Rumi, The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing
I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.
— Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture
Next time, can you ask him to bring cookies? I don't like to put up with that level of insane unless there's some kind of high-calorie compensation.
— Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls
And I realize the unbearable anguish of insanity: how uninformed people can be thinking insane people are "happy," O God, in fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me not to think the madhouses are full of "happy nuts." (p. 200)
— Jack Kerouac, Big Sur
I am not schizoid. A little manic-depressive, maybe.""'Know thyself.'" "We try, sir.
— Lois McMaster Bujold, Borders of Infinity
He had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel — they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.
— Stephen King, Misery
Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast... Viscosity and Velocity are opposites, yet they can look the same. Viscosity causes the stillness of disinclination; velocity causes the stillness of fascination. An observer can't tell if a person is silent and still because inner life has stalled, or because inner life is transfixingly busy.
— Susanna Kaysen
In a neurotic society, insane ideas can become 'normal', the current triumph of tribalism is the result of rabid global anti-intellectualism.
— Martijn Benders
Thinking you might be crazy can drive you crazy.
— Karl Marlantes, What It is Like to Go to War
When you aim high and you want to create a difference, all you need is a SPARK from your heart.
— Vishal Bhojwani, SPARK
Insanity on top of insanity. Even the voices in his head were hearing voices. Nice.
— Michael Wallace, The Devil's Deep
[n regard to Jesus believing himself inspired]This belief carried no more personal imputation than the belief of Socrates that he was under the care and admonition of a guardian demon. And how many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of these inspirations while perfectly sane on all other subjects (Works, Vol. iv, p. 327).
— Thomas Jefferson
To be called insane: challenge convention. To be called possessed: challenge religion.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I stared up at the black chiffon and tried to imagine my eternity. It looked very bleak. Hopefully, insanity would claim me quickly.
— Abbi Glines, Predestined
We're authors. We're more than a little unstable.
— Megan Linski
He found insanity no excuse, however, for irrational behavior.
— Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension
How are you still sane?""Who says I am? I only stopped asking myself the escape question when the walls started to answer me."Shit.
— Brodi Ashton, Neverfall
I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.
— Edgar Allan Poe, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
There is not much left to see in this world if one sees her once.
— Faraaz Kazi, Truly, Madly, Deeply
If I was crazy, would I know it? That's what being crazy was, wasn't it? You thought you were fine. Everyone else knew better.
— Kelley Armstrong, The Summoning
You walk a fine line between beautifully macabre and uncharacteristically psychotic.
— Solange nicole
Then he heard a wild, high-pitched cackling that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. It wasn't sane, that laugh. In fact, it was the laughter of someone who never had more than a nodding acquaintance with sanity.
— Mercedes Lackey, Fortune's Fool
If flatness were funny, a dinner plate would be hilarious.
— Walter Moers, Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures
Kyubey: ...Oh, geez. I never would have thought you capable of throwing your friend off a bridge. That wasn't a sane act, Madoka!
— Magica Quartet, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Vol. 02
You're bloody insane, Karede," Mat said. "Unfortunately, so am I.
— Robert Jordan
And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was getting worse, really maniacal.Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of, the great desert tracts in his consciousness.
— D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
You have lost your mind,"Jamie said coldly, the shock receding slightly. "Or I should think you had, if ye had one to lose.
— Diana Gabaldon, Voyager
there are institutions filled with people who talk to god. we've labeled and drugged them.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
Was it possible that perhaps the most plausible explanation was being offered by someone who anyone with an ounce of sanity would have long ago consigned to the realm of the insane?
— Tim Horvath
I put my clothing into the refrigerator and the foods into my wardrobe
—  am I in love?
When I can't sleep I count the buckles on my straightjacket.
— Cathie Linz, Bad Girls Don't
Addy, living one day without you would never be for the best. I want you every minute of every day. Forever. I love you.
— Lauren Hammond, Insanity
You see, insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.
— Joseph Kesselring, Arsenic and Old Lace
It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
— Ian McEwan, Saturday
Insanity is the greatest gift of humanity, for insanity talks to the mind of the delusion.
— Lionel Suggs
Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe.
— Christopher Hill
Please don't question the insane glaresJust give me today,And tomorrow,Tomorrowwe will matter.
— Nema Al-Araby, Remnants and Ashes
That's crazier than a boatload of prostitutes!
— J. Richard Singleton
Don't you just hate it when real life gets in the way of your own reality.
— Menna Anwar
She stopped shrieking after a moment. It wasn't the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn't managed to repair itself. She'd left something behind in that apartment. Something she'd always taken for granted. Faith in a rational world. It was like a tiny cog had been removed from her brain, and all the gears were still working, but a slight wobble was slowly and inevitably stripping the teeth until one day, without warning the Rube Goldberg device that was her mind would fall apart with a loud SPROING.
— A. Lee Martinez, Chasing the Moon
I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.
— Henry James
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are... than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
— Henry David Thoreau
If you thought better of me, you would not be so surprised
— Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen
When you're young, you say what you feel.When you're adult, you speak what you think.When you grow old, you listen to what nature says.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
I think, therefore I am, dangerous.
— D.A. Hanks, Green Day - A Novel of U.N. Totalitarian Control
I'd run you know. It's like when you're really busy doing something and you don't have time to think about things. Well, I'd run and run and run so I couldn't think.
— Melina Marchetta, Looking for Alibrandi
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
— Aldous Huxley
If you think that your hardest problem is what color shoes to wear.You should get out more!
— Anthony T. Hincks
It's when I'm feeling blue that I think of my little color pink.
— Anthony T.Hincks
Sometimes I think that we're the aliens.
— Anthony T. Hincks
The problem with doing cutting edge research is that the masses think that you are nuts!
— Steven Magee
Think of exercise as medicine and take your daily prescription.
— Steven Magee
I’ve always been under the assumption that death is a one-time, encompassing event.” “Why would you ever think that?
— Grace Draven, Eidolon
Some want more than they need, and others think they need more than they want. That's why we have so many greedy people who can't share with the poor.
— Gift Gugu Mona
Censorship: It allows you not to think for yourself.
— Anthony T. Hincks
if you think DRINKING is bad, then stop THINKING (ejump,2017)
— ejump - 2017
If you go to thinking take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you. Love is empty without thinking, thinking hollow without love
— C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus
Don't think it. Do it!
— Anthony T. Hincks
I don't think-""Clearly. Why start now?
— Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm
No matter how much we think about something, in the end, the decision is made on how we feel.
— Jeffrey Fry
Don't you ever think of giving up!!!
— Charmaine J. Forde
Fame and glory belong to those who are the first to achieve things, not those who only think about it or do it after it's been done.
— Nabil N. Jamal
A modern woman sees a piece of linen, but the mediaeval woman saw through it to the flax fields, she smelt the reek of the retting ponds, she felt the hard rasp of the hackling, and she saw the soft sheen of the glossy flax. Man did not see 'just leather', he saw the beast - perhaps one of his own - and knew the effort of slaughtering, liming and curing.Communities were smaller and whether our man lived on the outskirts of some feudal system, had escaped from it, or was entirely isolated, he would work alone, or daily with the same fellow-workers - conversation would soon languish.But THINK he must.
— Dorothy Hartley, The Land Of England: English Country Customs Through The Ages
Isolation allows me to think more clearly, and I think out loud sometimes.After all, I wouldn't want to accuse anyone of plagiarism.
— Charmaine J. Forde
Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!
— Mary Shelly, Frankenstein
A lot of highly-educated people have been told what to think, therefore, they think they know it all. The other segment of the population has to figure out how to think, therefore they question everything.
— Jewel E. Ann, Scarlet Stone
Most of us think we're too busy or too important to rest for a day.
— Craig Groeschel, Weird: Because Normal Isn't Working