Quotes about Insanity

He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.

It is a wise thing to be polite; consequently, it is a stupid thing to be rude. To make enemies by unnecessary and willful incivility, is just as insane a proceeding as to set your house on fire. For politeness is like a counter--an avowedly false coin, with which it is foolish to be stingy.

To openly defy Him who is clothed with omnipotence, who can rend us in pieces or cast us into Hell any moment He pleases, is the very height of insanity. To

A perfectly sane intellect is hardly at home in this insane world.

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness…

It would be superfluous to drive us mad, my dear Watson, said he. A candid observer would certainly declare that we were so already before we embarked upon so wild an experiment.

It was insanity, but it sounded romantic.

Martin Luther offers a powerful reminder in our temptation to go at life on our own: The world is insane. It tries to get rid of its insanity by the use of wisdom and reason; and it looks for many ways and means, for all sorts of help and advice on how to escape this distress.

You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity.

And now we get realized to us once more another thing which we often forget—or try to: that no man has a wholly undiseased mind; that in one way or another all men are mad.

At the time I would have endorsed the radical notions of R. D. Laing that insanity was a sane reaction to an insane society. Leaving the insane society to set up an independent self-sufficient commune seemed like a very sensible noble brave thing to do—plus it figured to be good for my mental health. Had I gone crazy in Boston or New York I would have blamed my culture and society without a second thought. The arguments were all packed, polished, and ready to fly.

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