Quotes and Sayings about Sanity
"The human mind, if it is to keep its sanity, must maintain the nicest balance between unity and plurality."
- Irving Babbitt
(Related: Balance, Mind, Sanity, Unity)
"The fight for sanity in our gun safety laws is not by any means over. In many ways it's just beginning."
- Michael D. Barnes
(Related: Beginning, Fight, Laws, Safety, Sanity)
"You've got to have a sense of humor to keep your sanity."
- Lance Bass
(Related: Humor, Sanity, Sense)
"Love: A temporary insanity curable by marriage."
- Ambrose Bierce
(Related: Marriage, Insanity)
"You only require two things in life: your sanity and your wife."
- Tony Blair
(Related: Wife, Sanity)
"I always made a point of telling the doctors I was sane, and asking to be released, but the more I endeavored to assure them of my sanity, the more they doubted it."
- Nellie Bly
(Related: Doctors, Sanity)
"How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination."
- Nellie Bly
(Related: Imagination, Pleas, Sanity, Will, Woman)
"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you."
- Rita Mae Brown
(Related: Americans, Friends, Illness, Sanity, Statistics, Suffering)
"Control your life through insanity."
- Cliff Burton
(Related: Life, Control, Insanity)
"You have to keep your sanity as well as know how to distance yourself from it while still holding onto the reins tightly. That is a very difficult thing to do, but I'm learning."
- Diahann Carroll
(Related: Learning, Sanity)
"Those who kept their sanity and humanity intact in the face of awful adversity. Heroes named and unnamed, some known only to God."
- Silvia Cartwright
(Related: God, Adversity, Heroes, Humanity, Sanity)
"Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be."
- Miguel de Cervantes
(Related: Life, Madness, May, Sanity)
"We're much more controlled now. We were kids back then, we each had our own demons. It was insanity."
- Peter Criss
(Related: Insanity, Kids, Now)
"I want a world without war, a world without insanity. I want to see people do well. I don't even think it's as much as what I want for myself. It's more what I want for the people around me. That's what I want."
- Tom Cruise
(Related: War, People, Insanity, Want, World)
"I've kept my sanity in this business by trying out for a role and then going home and trying to forget about it."
- Blythe Danner
(Related: Business, Home, Forget, Sanity, Trying)
"For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity."
- Jean Dubuffet
(Related: Imagination, Creativity, Insanity)
"Human beings have speculated about the relationship between inspiration and insanity for centuries."
- Patty Duke
(Related: Inspiration, Insanity)
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Results)
"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
(Related: Wife, People, Difference, Doubt, Insanity, Man, Mankind)
"The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success."
- Bruce Feirstein
(Related: Success, Genius, Insanity)
"I believe sanity and realism can be restored to the teaching of Mathematical Statistics most easily and directly by entrusting such teaching largely to men and women who have had personal experience of research in the Natural Sciences."
- Ronald Fisher
(Related: Experience, Men, Women, Realism, Research, Sanity, Statistics, Teaching)
"I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself."
- Jonathan Franzen
(Related: Insanity)
"Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight."
- Marilyn French
(Related: Love, Power, Delusion, Insanity, Mind, Self)
"Sanity is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought."
- Erich Fromm
(Related: Thought, Sanity)
"A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Society, Eccentricity, Sanity)
"There's a big difference between sanity and insanity."
- Megan Gallagher
(Related: Difference, Insanity)
"I've had my moments of insanity. But there is a certain responsibility to set proper examples for your children, and that influences your choices in every aspect of your life."
- Andy Garcia
(Related: Life, Children, Choices, Insanity, Moments, Responsibility)
"Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops."
- Cary Grant
(Related: Family, Insanity)
"I was disappointed, not because we had lost the war but because our people had allowed it to go on for so many years, instead of heeding the few voices of protest against all that mass insanity and slaughter."
- George Grosz
(Related: War, People, Insanity, Protest, Years)
"The President must stop gambling with taxpayers' money and get the country back on the path of fiscal sanity."
- Tom Harkin
(Related: Money, Country, Gambling, President, Sanity)
"Everything in Italy that is particularly elegant and grand borders upon insanity and absurdity or at least is reminiscent of childhood."
- Alexander Herzen
(Related: Absurdity, Childhood, Insanity, Italy)
"Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
(Related: Insanity, Logic, Mind)
"Acting is a way of living out one's insanity."
- Isabelle Huppert
(Related: Acting, Insanity, Living)
"People in the business will stay with you through drugs and alcohol and divorces and insanity and everything else, but you have a failure, pal, and they don't want to know nothing about you!"
- Don Johnson
(Related: Business, People, Failure, Alcohol, Drugs, Insanity, Nothing, Want, Will)
"The whole decathlon is ridiculous, but the 1,500 meters is insanity."
- Rafer Johnson
(Related: Insanity)
"My grandmother had the most dramatic effect on my life because she set me in one direction, and I had to go back the other direction for my sanity, and for my ability to be a social human being."
- James Earl Jones
(Related: Life, Ability, Being, Direction, Effect, Sanity)
"I nursed men back to sanity who were driven to despair. I solicited clothes for the ragged children, for the desperate mothers. I laid out the dead, the martyrs of the strike."
- Mary Harris Jones
(Related: Men, Children, Clothes, Despair, Martyrs, Mothers, Sanity)
"I only have so much energy, so something had to go. This is why, at the end of the day, I've preserved my sanity for the children and also manage to do my best at work."
- Kiri Te Kanawa
(Related: Work, Children, Day, End, Energy, Sanity)
"Look, we're all saddled with things that make us better or worse. This world is a crazy place, and I've chosen to make my work about that insanity."
- Barbara Kruger
(Related: Work, Insanity, World)
"Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world."
- R. D. Laing
(Related: Insanity, World)
"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."
- John Lennon
(Related: Effect, Insanity, Mind, Reality, Surrealism)
"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
- Oscar Levant
(Related: Genius, Insanity)
"Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children."
- Sam Levenson
(Related: Children, Insanity)
"Genius is one of the many forms of insanity."
- Cesare Lombroso
(Related: Genius, Insanity)
"Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity."
- H. P. Lovecraft
(Related: People, Feelings, Crime, Insanity, Religious)
"Here lies a nuisance dedicated to sanity."
- David Low
(Related: Lies, Sanity)
"I am told that the clinical definition of insanity is the tenancy to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results."
- Stephen F. Lynch
(Related: Insanity, Results)
"It was an hour of sanity with the good guys winning, a situation where the world was right side up."
- James MacArthur
(Related: Winning, Right, Sanity, World)
"I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind."
- Norman Mailer
(Related: Ability, Mind, Quick, Sanity)
"I think if one wants to be in a continual state of insanity one should stay married to that writing partner."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Insanity, State, Writing)
"I want to work with great directors and try not to put too much pressure on myself and just read things for the story and recognize when I'm drawn to something for the right reasons and try to maintain some sanity."
- Rachel McAdams
(Related: Work, Pressure, Right, Sanity, Want)
"I can choose to accelerate my disease to an alcoholic death or incurable insanity, or I can choose to live within my thoroughly human condition."
- Mercedes McCambridge
(Related: Death, Disease, Insanity)
"Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, should or could be the global gendarme."
- Robert McNamara
(Related: Conscience, Sanity, states, United)
"I maintain my sanity by keeping my distance."
- Luis Miguel
(Related: Sanity)
"I think I can take responsibility for that in that I was the audience. I was the voice of sanity around whom all these crazies did their dance. And I reacted in the same way that a member of the audience would have reacted."
- Mary Tyler Moore
(Related: Dance, Responsibility, Sanity, Voice)
"Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life."
- Edvard Munch
(Related: Death, Life, Angels, Insanity, Sickness)
"Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life."
- Edvard Munch
(Related: Death, Life, Angels, Disease, Insanity)
"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Insanity, Nations)
"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Insanity, Nations)
"Religion is induced insanity."
- Madalyn Murray O'Hair
(Related: Religion, Insanity)
"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
- Edgar Allan Poe
(Related: Sanity)
"I think people are going to return to sanity when they see how ridiculous many of these charges are, and how the predictions are not borne out."
- Dixie Lee Ray
(Related: People, Sanity)
"I organized Sweet Honey In The Rock in 1973. The music was sanity and balance."
- Bernice Johnson Reagon
(Related: Music, Balance, Sanity)
"In the late '70s I started to search for the perfect sound - whatever that might be, before that I was mainly interested in drugs, insanity and the rock'n'roll lifestyle."
- Lou Reed
(Related: Drugs, Insanity, Sound)
"For a lot of kids, the Boys and Girls Club is really a sanctuary, an oasis of sanity and safety for them because their home life is so tragic. Some of these kids have only one parent, and that one is addicted to drugs."
- Judge Reinhold
(Related: Home, Life, Boys, Drugs, Girls, Kids, Safety, Sanity)
"Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting."
- John Russell
(Related: Madness, Sanity)
"If you're running for president, you've got to do a lot of things to line up a candidacy. I've not done any of those things. It's not my plan. My plan is to be a good chairman of the House Budget Committee and fight for the fiscal sanity of this nation."
- Paul Ryan
(Related: Committee, Fight, Nation, President, Running, Sanity)
"What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art."
- Augustus Saint-Gaudens
(Related: Art, Insanity)
"Sanity is madness put to good use."
- George Santayana
(Related: Madness, Sanity)
"Their coverage on the Fox News Channel has been atrocious. The stuff that comes out of Sean Hannity's mouth has been infuriating. The stuff that Bill O'Reilly says has been illogical. You go up and down the schedule and it's insanity over there. The number of lies, perpetuated, promoted by Fox News is just shameful and it hurts everybody."
- David Shuster
(Related: Insanity, Lies, News)
"Sanity is a cozy lie."
- Susan Sontag
(Related: Lie, Sanity)
"Order is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state. Like beams in a house or bones to a body, so is order to all things."
- Robert Southey
(Related: Health, Peace, Body, Mind, Order, Sanity, Security, State)
"I hope for peace and sanity - it's the same thing."
- Studs Terkel
(Related: Peace, Hope, Sanity)
"I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me."
- Hunter S. Thompson
(Related: Sex, Drugs, Insanity)
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."
- Hunter S. Thompson
(Related: Alcohol, Drugs, Hate, Insanity, Violence)
"To stand up on a stage alone with an acoustic guitar requires bravery bordering on heroism. Bordering on insanity."
- Richard Thompson
(Related: Bravery, Guitar, Heroism, Insanity)
"The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep."
- James Thurber
(Related: Time, End, Months, Sanity, Sleep)
"One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition."
- Alvin Toffler
(Related: Ability, Sanity)
"It's insanity for a party that believes in freedom to allow some Republicans to seize an agenda that is totally alien to the agenda that was established in the election."
- Malcolm Wallop
(Related: Freedom, Insanity, Party, Republicans)
"Coming out to gays is a way of affirming sanity and self-worth."
- George Weinberg
(Related: Sanity, Self)
"Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it."
- Elizabeth Wurtzel
(Related: Insanity)