Do you have any idea how mad you sound?’‘Indeed I do. I have in moments of doubt considered the question of my sanity.’ (…)‘And?’‘Then I consider what a piece of work is man. How defective in reason, how mean his facilities, how ugly in form and movement, in action how like a devil, in apprehension...

My life edges out any sense of sanity I can have, and I come to realize there won’t be a point where things can be ordinary again, or as ordinary as I would have them.

The moment her hymen was plucked from her body in the wilderness, Her soul was taken from sanity.

Our rocky ledge overlooking the valley. Perhaps a little less green than usual, but the blackberry bushes hang heavy with fruit. Here began countless days of hunting and snaring, fishing and gathering, roaming together through the woods, unloading our thoughts while we filled our game bags. This was the doorway to both sustenance and sanity....

The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time. Two rats, then.

Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?

Your own brain ought to have the decency to be on your side!

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.

If you haven’t lost your mind yet, that’s because you haven’t seen very much.

If you were a sane woman, I would, of course, behave in a more rational fashion. Since you are a lunatic, however, this is the only way.

Perfect sanity is a myth propagated by straitjacket salesmen.

The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I’m a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know—what’ll it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual?...

Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.

Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately.

I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance...

Sanity is a valuable possesion; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

To be physically astute and psychologically tended, yet morally insulated and conceptually blind–is to be crazy, not healthy.

He couldn’t even find the will to yell at her now. A real man didn’t yell at those who weren’t exactly sane themselves, he told himself.

but i’m still here. sometimes i wonder why i’m still waiting. sometimes i’m shaking. that’s how you make me. sometimes i question why i’m still here. sometimes i think that i’m crazy.

Man may trust man, Prince Elric, but perhaps we’ll never have a truly sane world until men learn to trust mankind. That would mean the death of magic, I think.

Here lies a gentleman boldWho was so very braveHe went to lengths untold,And on the brink of the graveDeath had on him no hold.By the world he set small store–He frightened it to the core–Yet somehow, by Fate’s plan,Though he’d lived a crazy man,When he died he was sane once more.

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.

Sometimes, to regain sanity, one had to acknowledge and embrace the madness.

They nearly saved my sanity.

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.

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.

Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!

Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;

And I still say it was just a coincidence;’ he muttered pugnaciously. ‘You say it too! Look at me and say it! It was just a coincidence. That happened to be the nearest place on the dial where they both met exactly, those two hands. My blows dented them. They got stuck there just as...

At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.

Just because I’m insane doesn’t mean I have to act all crazy.

Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded…

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.

The point is, you see,” said Ford, “that there is no point in driving yourself mad trying to stop yourself going mad. You might just as well give in and save your sanity for later.

Got us a full moon too coming tomorrow night. Just make things a whole lot worse. All we need.- Why is that?- What’s that, Marshal?- The full moon. You think it makes people crazy?- I know it does.- Found a wrinkle in one of the pages and used his index finger to smooth it out.-...

At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,’ was his mildly cadaverous reply.

Don’t worry. You’re just as sane as I am.

When you get to the end of your rope. Tie a knot and hang on.

[…] nobody anywhere seemed to be willing to ponder for a moment the possibility that a human being who refused to participate, who refused to speak or listen, who failed to ‘interact with his peer group‘, might not be all that crazy, and might even have arrived at an understandable response to the world in...

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.

If you think anyone is sane you just don’t know enough about them.

Writing is a solitary existence, especially if you forget to chat to your friends – sorry, I meant characters.

Somewhere, beyond blackness, some tyrant host swaps breathing for airlessness to test me. I had no concept of myself, no link to the things I knew. It is hard to explain the lack of anything concrete to people who live in a world of objects, but there are worlds that are nothing but sensations and...

What’s the difference between sanity and madness anyway? We all play headgames with ourselves. We all have baggage. We all cope somehow. I’m not sure if I’m mad or sane. I mean, I hold my life together, I pay my bills, I raise my kids. But the world is so polarized and bizarre now that...

Put the price only on products and not on a person, either self or anyone, as products need packaging and place for promotion while a person needs originality to create own space and firstly BE HUMAN

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...

Kaysen elaborates through parts of the book on her thoughts about how mental illness is treated. She explains that families who are willing to pay the rather high costs of hospitalization do so to prove their own sanity. Once one member of the family is hospitalized, it becomes easier for the rest of the family...

If we were to gain God’s perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads...

I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn’t make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

In the 1950s at least less was expected of women. Now we’re supposed to build a career, build a home, be the supermum that every child deserves, the perfect wife, meet the demands of elderly parents, and still stay sane.