Insanity Quotes - Page 24

• How comes it that a cripple does not offend us, but a fool does? Because a cripple recognizes that we walk straight, whereas a fool declares that it is we who are silly; if it were not so, we should feel pity and not anger.

  Blaise Pascal

  Silly, Doe, Fool

  Blaise Pascal (2007). “Thoughts”, p.34, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Erroneous views and presumptuousness send a talent to the insane asylum.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Views, Insane, Asylums

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• The Door Without a Key is the Door of Dreams; it is the door by which the sensitive escape into insanity when life is too hard for them, and artists use it as a window in a watch-tower. Psychologists call it a psychological mechanism; magicians call it magic, and the man in the street calls it illusion or charlatanry according to taste. It does not matter to me what it is called, for it is effectual.

  Dion Fortune

  Dream, Artist, Men

  Dion Fortune (2003). “Moon Magic”, p.83, Weiser Books

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• To search for wisdom apart from Christ means not simply foolhardiness but utter insanity.

  John Calvin

  Mean, Christ

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• Writing sustains me. But wouldn’t it be better to say it sustains this kind of life? Which doesn't mean life is any better when I don’t write. On the contrary, it is far worse, wholly unbearable, and inevitably ends in madness. This is, of course, only on the assumption that I am a writer even when I don’t write - which is indeed the case; and a non-writing writer is, in fact, a monster courting insanity.

  Franz Kafka

  Writing, Mean, Unbearable

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• It is insanity to run from God and search for love.

  Erwin McManus

  Running, Searching For Love

  Erwin Raphael McManus (2008). “Soul Cravings: An Exploration of the Human Spirit”, p.50, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes successful in show business.

  Francis Ford Coppola

  Successful, Wish, Firsts

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• I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That's what we really pay attention to anyway. We don't talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing.

  Tibor Kalman

  Imperfection, Flying, Attention

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• Despite the insanity of using whether you would want to have a beer with someone as a legitimate reason for voting for or against them, I always felt that is indicative of a massive problem in politics: It matters as much what your personality is as how smart you are or how good you are at your job. That is a huge, huge problem. A lot of people who are very smart or very good at their jobs are not people I would want to ever have a beer with - but I would want them making massive policy decisions with huge implications for the future of the planet.

  Michael Schur

  Jobs, Smart, Beer

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The great characteristic of men of active genius is a sublime self-confidence, springing not from self-conceit, but from an intense identification of the man with his object, which lifts him altogether above the fear of danger and death, which gives to his enterprise a character of insanity to the common eye, and which communicates an almost superhuman audacity to his will.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Character, Eye, Self Confidence

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.87

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• Every hand and every hour should be devoted to rescue the world from its insanity of guilt, and to assuage the pangs of human hearts with balm and anodyne. To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.

  Horace Mann

  Heart, Hands, Guilt

  Horace Mann (1867). “Lectures and Annual Reports on Education”, p.325

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• A genuine invention in the realm of ideas must first emerge as an abstruse and even partial concept? At first blusha new idea appearstobe verycloseto insanity because to be new it must reverse important basic beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, have been institutionalized and are administered by one or another kind of priesthood with a vested interest in an old idea.

  Arthur Miller

  Ideas, Important, Firsts

  1958 The Collected Plays,'Introduction, II'.

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• It's probably hard for anyone looking at my landscapes today to realize that I was once regarded as a rebel, a dangerous influence; that I've been told I was on the verge of insanity, that my painting was nothing but meaningless daubs. Lawren Harris, the man most responsible for drawing the Group of Seven together, was accused of something perilously close to treason - his paintings, said his severest critics, were discouraging immigration.

  A. Y. Jackson

  Men, Drawing, Criticism

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• Chess, which exists predominantly in two dimensions, is one of the world's most difficult games. Three-dimensional chess is an invitation to insanity. But human relationships, even of the simplest order, are like a kind of four-dimensional chess, a game whose pieces and positions change subtly and inexorably between moves, whose players stare dumbly while their powerful positions deteriorate into hopeless predicaments and while improbable combinations suddenly become inevitable. To make matters worse, some games are open to any number of players, and all sides are expected to win.

  Robert Grudin

  Powerful, Moving, Winning

  Robert Grudin (1997). “Time and the Art of Living”, p.95, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If we lose our sanity ... We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots, the howl of the utterly lost howling their nowhereness.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Idiot, Lost, Howl

  D. H. Lawrence (2008). “Complete Poems by Lawrence: Easyread Super Large 18pt Edition”, p.476, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It's not getting easier; if anything, it's always right on the edge of my skin.

  Erwin McManus

  Loneliness, Suffering, Despair

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• Sometimes a god comes.... He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Dream, Wall, Bridges

  "The Word for World Is Forest". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1972.

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• As I walk through This wicked world Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity, I ask myself Is all hope lost? Is there only pain and hatred, and misery? And each time I feel like this inside, There's one thing I wanna know: What's so funny 'bout Peace, Love, & Understanding?

  Elvis Costello

  Pain, Light, Hatred

  Song: Peace, Love And Understanding

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• In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.

  R. D. Laing

  Mad, Trying, Transition

  "The Divided Self". Book by R. D. Laing, Ch. 1, 1960.

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• I am quite sure that a good number of "cures" of psychotics consist in the fact that the patient has decided, for one reason or other, once more to play at being sane.

  R. D. Laing

  Play, Numbers, Facts

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• The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.

  William James

  Vision, Facts, Horror

  William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.158, Booklassic

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• All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. That can't be disproved, but we have no choice but to follow our senses.

  Isaac Asimov

  Choices, Humanity, Common

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• I think marriage is all about timing. Getting married is insanity; I mean, it's a risk - who knows if you're going to be together forever? But you both say, 'We're going to take this chance, in the same spirit.

  Cate Blanchett

  Mean, Thinking, Forever

  "Cate Blanchett: 'Getting Married Is Insanity'". people.com. January 12, 2007.

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• The captain, thinking over this event afterward, realized that by his own lifelong standards he had a crew composed entirely of lunatics, with himself well to the front in degree of aberration; but he was fairly sure that this particular form of insanity was going to be useful.

  Hal Clement

  Thinking, Aberration, Captains

  "Mission of Gravity" by Hal Clement, (Ch. 9), 1954.

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• Our neighborhood - this solar system, the cosmos, actually - is so much more vast and amazing than the paltry headlines, insanity, and politics crammed at us daily as so-called news. The beauty of the hood and discoveries that await us are deserving of our attention and mandatory to our survival as a species.

  Vanna Bonta

  Discovery, Survival, Cosmos

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