Insanity Quotes - Page 19

• I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics...What's happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating wide-spread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we're getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought...occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like...because they feel an inadequacy in classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Real, Fall, Thinking

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.

  R. D. Laing

  Independence, Negative, Perfectly Natural

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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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• 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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• This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly - with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.

  Paul Auster

  Gambling, Risk, Tables

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• Baby, I have no idea how this will end. Maybe the equator will fall like a hula hoop from the earth's hips and our mouths will freeze mid-kiss on our 80th anniversary or maybe tomorrow my absolute insanity combined with the absolute obstacle course of your communication skills will leave us like a love letter in a landfill. But whatever, however, whenever this ends I want you to know that right now, I love you forever.

  Andrea Gibson

  Inspirational, Baby, Fall

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• I'm of an age when if I started to do eulogies, I'd be doing nothing else. You don't want to be remembered? I don't want them to be told to remember me.

  Garrison Keillor

  Life, Death, Eulogy

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• Senator Rand Paul reflected on Mitt Romney's potential 2016 campaign and said, 'It's sort of what Einstein said, that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.' When someone told him Einstein didn't actually say that, he said, 'In the words of Gandhi, 'My bad.''

  Jimmy Fallon

  Different, Campaigns, Definitions

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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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• If everyone could understand the working of a psychopath's mind, we undoubtedly would be closer to insanity ourselves.

  Dan Simmons

  Mind, Would Be, Psychopath

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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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• A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books appear almost accidentally, like a sudden surge in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are a part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Attitude, Book, Writing

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, Afterword to the 10th anniversary edition, written in Gothenburg, Sweden, 1984.

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• Intercourse is after all man's best teacher. "Know thyself" is an excellent maxim; but even self-knowledge cannot be perfected in closets and cloisters--nor amid lake scenery, and on the sunny side of the mountains. Men who seldom mix with their fellow-creatures are almost sure to be one-sided--the victims of fixed ideas, that sometimes lead to insanity.

  William Matthews

  Teacher, Men, Lakes

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• 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

  Rocks, Perfect, Drug

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• There's the old saying that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. There are few better places to apply that adage than the drug war. It's time to end it. It's time to restore peace and harmony to Latin America and the United States. It's time to end the failed war on drugs. It's time to legalize drugs.

  Jacob G. Hornberger

  Latin, War, America

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• I never did heroin, because I thought that meant I was doing heavy drugs, which shows you the insanity of doing drugs. I probably should have done heroin, because I understand heroin actually makes you feel good. Cocaine just makes you stupid.

  Tommy Shaw

  Stupid, Should Have, Feel Good

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The step between genius and insanity is very short.

  Albert Einstein

  Steps, Genius

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• This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn't see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.

  Susanna Kaysen

  People, Interesting, Acting

  Susanna Kaysen (2013). “Girl, Interrupted”, p.41, Vintage

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• 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

  Crazy, Looks, World

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• Psychopaths know the technical difference between right and wrong - which is one of the reasons their insanity pleas in criminal cases so rarely succeed; they just fail to act on that knowledge.

  Jeffrey Kluger

  Differences, Succeed, Criminals

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• I will not counter the insanity of the PATRIOT Act with an overblown fear of my rights being taken away.

  Penn Jillette

  Taken, Rights, Patriot

  "Penn Jillette on Election 2008". Interview With David Weigel, reason.com. November 3, 2008.

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• If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

  Aldous Huxley

  Insane, Society, Humans

  Aldous Huxley (1955). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

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• The ecstatic insanity of romantic pursuit can be so enhanced by music that entire romantic conquests, victories and ruinous, crushing defeats can be tied to songs to such a degree that it's almost unbearable to listen to them again, as they bring back the memories so vividly.

  Henry Rollins

  Crush, Song, Memories

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• May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: 'Sleep hath its own world', and it is often as lifelike as the other.

  Lewis Carroll

  Dream, Sleep, Inability

  Lewis Carroll, Edward Wakeling (1994). “Lewis Carroll's Diaries: Containing Journal 4, January to December 1856”

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