Sanity Quotes

“You never know what lurks just beneath the surface of my fragile sanity.”
― Ashly Lorenzana

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, but some, to dream.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“She wasn't about to go down that road herself, which was a testament to her spiritual awakening and her commitment to sanity. It was a real blessing that she didn't follow me, because oftentimes, people go out together and one comes back and the other doesn't. Or both of them never do.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“Don't be ashamed of reliving your childhood, Ox, because all of us must do it now and then to maintain our sanity.”
― Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds

“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.”
― Michael Moorcock, The Elric Saga Part I

“Most sane human beings’ chances of being alive in a thousand years’ time are a hundred times higher than their chances of being sincerely happy for at least ten consecutive days.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“All things being equal, he preferred to do business with people who were sane.”
― Amanda Quick, Burning Lamp

“The history of your world is filled with the voice of the victor, the voice of power, although it was not always a voice of sanity, by any means.”
― Barbara Marciniak, Family of Light: Pleiadian Tales and Lessons in Living

“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.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left — sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“The Amish are islands of sanity in a whirlpool of change.”
― Nancy Sleeth, Almost Amish: One Woman's Quest for a Slower, Simpler, More Sustainable Life

“Now, we shall be able to judge the extent of the spiritual undernourishment if we look at all these movements from another angle: not as errors but rather as attempts to find healing. I use this comparison: For a long time medical men combated fever as if it itself constituted the illness. Medicine today inclines rather to respect it, not only as a symptom of the disease but of the struggle of the organism against the disease. True, it is this struggle which makes it ill, and yet this very struggle is also the proof of its vitality and is the necessary way to healing.”
― Paul Tournier, The Whole Person in a Broken World

“Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation between sanity and insanity ... Make the definition too narrow, it becomes meaningless; make it too wide, and the whole human race becomes involved in the dragnet. In strictness we are all mad when we give way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, prejudiced and vain people were to be locked up as lunatics, who is to keep the key to the asylum?"

(Editorial, The Times, 22 July 1853)”
― Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

“Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead.”
― Tahir Shah

“As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.”
― Alan Ayckbourn

“But I cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the truth. I have to worry about the truth that can be lived with. And that is the difference between losing your marbles drinking the salty sea, or swallowing the stuff from the streams. My Niece-of-Shame believes in the talking cure, eh?" says Alsana, with something of a grin. "Talk, talk, talk and it will be better. Be honest, slice open your heart and spread the red stuff around. But the past is made of more than words, dearie. We married old men, you see? These bumps"--Alsana pats them both --"they will always have daddy-long-legs for fathers. One leg in the present, one in the past. No talking will change this. Their roots will always be tangled. And roots get dug up. Just look in my garden - birds at the coriander every bloody day...”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?"
Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard, "Yes, I'm afraid of spiders."
"Were you always?"
"What are you, a psychiatrist?"
Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine's eyes on him, appraising his line of questioning.
"Is it possible that the trauma of losing your best friend as a child and the trauma of losing your wife as an adult and the trauma of seeing Laine's husband take his life in front of you just recently..." Pritam shrugged and raised his palms, "You see where I'm going?"
Nicholas looked at Laine. She watched back. Her gray eyes missed nothing.
"Sure," agreed Nicholas, standing. "And my sister's nuts, too, and we both like imagining that little white dogs are big nasty spiders because our daddy died and we never got enough cuddles."
"Your father died?" asked Laine. "When?"
"Who cares?"
Pritam sighed. "You must see this from our point of - "
"I'd love to!" snapped Nicholas. "I'd love to see it from your point of view, because mine is not that much fun! It's insane! It's insane that I see dead people, Pritam! It's insane that this," he flicked out the sardonyx necklace,"stopped me from kidnapping a little girl!"
"That's what you believe," Pritam said carefully.
"That's what I fucking believe!" Nicholas stabbed his finger through the air at the dead bird talisman lying slack on the coffee table.”
― Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path

“Who we are usually depends on who is—or who we think is—looking at us.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.”
― Artaud, Antonin

“Don't be too hard on yourself!
Sanity doesn't want to go haywire.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“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 the works died, that was all. Stay sane whatever you do. Say it over and over. It was just a coincidence!'

Outside the tall French windows, in the velvety night-sky, the stars in all their glory twinkled derisively in at them. ("Speak To Me Of Death")”
― Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich

“For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam’s front parlor? What is imagination without common sense, but the aspiration to out-dandy Beau Brummell with nothing but a bit of faded muslin and a limp cravat? What is Creation without common sense, but a scandalous thing without form or function, like a matron with half a dozen unattached daughters?

And God looked upon the Creation in all its delightful multiplicity, and saw that, all in all, it was quite Amiable.”
― Vera Nazarian, Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons

“Most sane people feel happy way less often than they act happy.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The threads of sanity and insanity are interwoven in me beautifully. You can choose to scrutinize one thread and judge me or observe both and admire the magnificence.”
― Vinod Varghese Antony

“Stanley forced a smile to his lips at the memory of the onesided romance; it was silly, after all, a stupid childhood crush. Who’d fall in love with a fictional character? That was the kind of thing you laughed about as an adult. Or at least Harriet had thought so. He couldn’t quite do it, though. Couldn’t quite see it as a joke. It had felt too real, too raw and wild and fierce, for him to
dismiss it even now. It was love, of a sort, stunted and unformed as it was. For a time, it had kept him sane.”
― Amelia Mangan, Release

“We never discuss politics unless we're at least half-drunk, Lord Kalen. That's how we maintain our sanity.”
― Rin Chupeco, The Shadowglass

“Sane leadership is the unshakeable confidence that people can be generous, creative, and kind. The leader’s role is to create the conditions for these qualities to be evoked and utilized to accomplish good work.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley, Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity, and Kindness in Ourselves and Our Organizations

“Sanity is an honest relationship with reality. Sanity is seeing clearly, free of our filters, judgments, biases. When we see what’s going on, then we can discern what actions might be useful. Sanity creates possibilities.”
― Margaret J. Wheatley , Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity, and Kindness in Ourselves and Our Organizations

“The human brain, for all its sophistication, would be useless without its link to the outside world. Consider one experiment that illustrates this point. Volunteers hallucinated when they were deprived of sensory input by being blindfolded and suspended and warm water in a sensory deprivation tank. One saw charging pink and purple elephants. Another heard a chorus, still others had taste hallucinations. Our very sanity depends on a continuous flow of information from the outside.”
― Marieb Elaine N. Hoehn Katja

“The gathering of knowledge in the face of our certain doom kept us sane and gave us the drive to go on, step after step, fight after fight.”
― Ken Liu, Star Wars: The Legends of Luke Skywalker