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Insanity is extreme folly

• Insanity is behaving and thinking in an utterly foolish and unreasonable way
• Insanity: The state of being seriously mentally ill; madness. Something utterly foolish or unreasonable. Oxford Dictionary
• Madness: A state of severe mental illness. Behavior or thinking that is very foolish or dangerous. Cambridge Dictionary
• Insanity: Extreme foolishness; folly; senselessness; foolhardiness. Dictionary.com
• Fanatacism,  Illusion,  Stupidity

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Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting different results

• Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results. Albert Einstein
• I am told that the clinical definition of insanity is the tendency to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. Stephen F. Lynch
• One definition of insanity is to do the same thing, day-after-day, expecting different results. Mark Silber

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Insanity is not being able to stop yourself doing what is idiotic

• Insanity is knowing that what you’re doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can’t stop it. Elizabeth Wurtzel
• Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness. Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan
• Stupidity

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Insanity is not being able to think clearly

• The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. Nikola Tesla
• Thinking

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Insanity comes from listening to the world, not your heart

• A quick way to insanity is to listen to the world, and what it has to say about you. A sure way to stay sane is to listen to the gentle guidance given by your own heart.  Robert Beno
• One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too. Friedrich Nietzsche
• I think that dwelling on other people’s perception of you is the road to complete madness, unfortunately. I try and resist that. Kate Beckinsale

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Insanity comes from delusion

• I have seen mad people, and I have known some who were quite intelligent, lucid, even clear-sighted in every concern of life, except on one point. They could speak clearly, readily, profoundly on everything; till their thoughts were caught in the breakers of their delusions and went to pieces there, were dispersed and swamped in that furious and terrible sea of fogs and squalls which is called MADNESS. Guy De Maupassant
• To think that the spectre you see is an illusion does not rob him of his terrors: it simply adds the further terror of madness itself — and then on top of that the horrible surmise that those whom the rest call mad have, all along, been the only people who see the world as it really is. S. Lewis
• Illusion

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Insanity comes from unsound beliefs and premises

• The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds. Gerald G. Jampolsky
• A sane man often reasons from sound premises; an insane man commonly reasons as well, but the premises are unsound. Austin O’Malley
• Belief

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Insanity comes from reason overstretched

• Insanity destroys reason, but not wit. Nathaniel Emmons
• Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr
• There are so many kinds of madness, so many ways in which the human brain may go wrong; and so often it happens that what we call madness is both reasonable and just. It is so. Yes. A little reason is good for us, a little more makes wise men of some of us– but when our reason over-grows us and we reach too far, something breaks and we go insane. James Oliver Curwood
• Reason

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Insanity comes from facts obscurely interpreted

• Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit. G.K. Chesterton
• The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque. Philip K. Dick
• Facts

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Insanity comes from demanding only perfection of yourself and others

• Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. Anne Lamott
• Perfectionism

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Insanity comes from thoughts that obsess and torment

• So when you find yourself locked onto an unpleasant train of thought, heading for the places in your past where the screaming is unbearable, remember there’s always madness. Madness is the emergency exit. Alan Moore
• A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption. Guy de Maupassant
• I don’t possess these thoughts I have — they possess me. I don’t possess these feelings I have — They obsess me. Ashly Lorenzana
• Madness is to think of too many things in succession too fast, or of one thing too exclusively. Voltaire

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Insanity comes from an exceptional reaction to emotional problems

• If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us. Carl Jung

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Insanity comes from extreme fear

• Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. Bertrand Russell
• You learned to run from what you feel, and that’s why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control. Megan Chance
• Fear

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Insanity comes from severe mental agony

• We are not ourselves When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind To suffer with the body. William Shakespeare
• To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you’re frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane. Charles Bukowski
• Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria. Naomi Wolf
• Suffering

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Insanity comes from doubt and jealousy

• Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness. Gustave Flaubert
• Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness. Francois de La Rochefoucauld
• Doubt,  Jealousy

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Insanity comes from not having anyone to love

• We need others. We need others to love and we need to be loved by them. There is no doubt that without it, we too, like the infant left alone, would cease to grow, cease to develop, choose madness and even death. Leo Buscaglia
• He who feels no compassion will become insane. Hasidic Proverb
• Love

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Insanity comes from extreme solitude

• Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms. Guy de Maupassant
• Solitude,  Loneliness

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Insanity comes from being worn down and giving in

• Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed. G.K. Chesterton
• Soon madness has worn you down. It’s easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you’re worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.  Marya Hornbacher

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Insanity comes from losing touch with your instinctual nature

• The source of numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties occasioned by man’s progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious. The result is that modern man can know himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself–his consciousness therefor orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him, and it is to its peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical resources. This task is so exacting, and its fulfillment so advantageous, that he forgets himself in the process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively replace reality. Separation from his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able to neglect or suppress his instinctual side. Carl Jung

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Insanity comes from being estranged from your darker side

• The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us. The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being’s difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.   Elizabeth Gilbert
• I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Sylvia Plath
• When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell’s pitiless truth. Michel Foucault
• Darkness

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Hate is a kind of madness

• There is no passion more spectral or fantastical than Hate; not even its opposite, Love, so peoples air with phantoms, as this madness of the heart. Lord Byron
• Hate

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Anger is a kind of madness

• Anger is a choice, as well as a habit. It is a learned reaction to frustration, in which you behave in ways that you would rather not. In fact, severe anger is a form of insanity. You are insane whenever you are not in control of your behavior. Therefore, when you are angry and out of control, you are temporarily insane. Wayne Dyer
• Anger is short-lived madness. Horace
• Anger is a short madness. Dutch Proverb
• Whom the gods destroy they first make mad. Robert E. Howard
• Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you. G. M. Trevelyan
• Anger is a wound gone mad. Vanna Bonta
• Anger

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Love is a kind of madness that marriage soon cures

• Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self- destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can’t even think straight. Marilyn French
• Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage. Ambrose Bierce
• Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish’d and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. William Shakespeare
• There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. Friedrich Nietzsche
• When love is not madness, it is not love. Pedro Calderon de la Barca
• True, we love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness. Petrarch
• If this be not love, it is madness, and then it is pardonable. William Congreve
• Afflicted by love’s madness all are blind. Sextus Propertius
• For you to ask advice on the rules of love is no better than to ask advice on the rules of madness. Terence
• My wish is that you may be loved to the point of madness. André Breton
• One is very crazy when in love. Sigmund Freud
• Love,  Marriage

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Worry is a kind of madness

• Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness it is to be expecting evil before it comes. Seneca
• Worry

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The love of knowledge is a kind of madness

• The love of knowledge is a kind of madness. S. Lewis
• Books have led some to learning and others to madness. Petrarch
• Knowledge

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An obsession with money for money’s sake is a kind of madness

• It is sheer madness to live in want in order to be wealthy when you die. Juvenal
• One of the outstanding tragedies of this age of struggle and money- madness is the fact that so few people are engaged in the effort which they like best. Everyone should find his or her particular niche in the world’s work, where both material prosperity and happiness in abundance may be found. Napoleon Hill
• Money is our madness, our vast collective madness. D. H. Lawrence
• “Madness is badness of spirit, when one seeks profit from all sources. Aristotle
• Wealth

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Passion, ungoverned by reason, is a kind of madness

• Passion ungoverned by Reason is Madness. Benjamin Whichcote
• It is madness to think that we can fix an end to passions which we cannot control at their beginning. Seneca
• Passion often makes a madman of the cleverest man, and renders the greatest fools clever. François de La Rochefoucauld
• Passion,  Reason

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Opposing the present moment is a kind of madness

• Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you. Eckhart Tolle
• How do I know that the wind should blow? It’s blowing! I realized that it’s insane to oppose it. When I argue with reality, I lose—but only 100% of the time. Byron Katie
• Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is Life itself, it is an insane way to live. Eckhart Tolle
• To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably caries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness. Eckhart Tolle
• Accept this moment

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Depression is a kind of madness

• I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word ‘madness’ to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. ‘Madness’ is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression. Elizabeth Wurtzel
• The madness of depression is the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed- down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.  William Styron
• Depression

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Extreme grief is a kind of madness

• Excess of grief for the dead is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not. Xenophon
• There is a kind of euphoria of grief, a degree of madness. Nigella Lawson
• Grief

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Extreme ambition is a kind of madness

• Ambition, madam, is a great man’s madness. John Webster
• Ambition

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Striving for non-stop economic growth at any cost is a kind of madness

• Economics and a reliance on science and technology to solve our problems has led to an unsustainable situation where continued growth in consumption is required for governments and business to be considered successful. This is a form of insanity. Economics is at the heart of our destructive ways and our faith in it has blinded us. Dr David Suzuki

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Drunkenness is a kind of madness

• Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers. Ambrose Bierce
• A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle. Jonathan Swift
• Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness. Seneca

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Faith is a kind of madness – or is it?

• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. Friedrich Nietzsche
• Faith is a permanent and vital endowment of the human mind — a part of reason itself. The insane alone are without it. Eden Phillpotts
• Perhaps true faith is a form of insanity. Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• The opposite of faith is not doubt: It is certainty. It is madness. You can tell you have created God in your own image when it turns out that he or she hates all the same people you do. Anne Lamott
• Faith

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Religion, if it turns fanatical, can become a kind of madness

• Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity. H. P. Lovecraft
• Religion is induced insanity. Madalyn Murray O’Hair
• For virtue’s self may too much zeal be had; The worst of madmen is a saint run mad. Pope
• Religion,  Fanatacism

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Being unnecessarily rude is a kind of madness

• 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. Arthur Schopenhauer
• Rudeness

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The first sign of insanity is talking to yourself – or is it?

• First sign of madness, talking to your own head. J.K. Rowling
• The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept. George Carlin
• Maybe he’s normal and we’re the crazy ones. Maybe everyone should talk to themselves. Maybe we’re all just afraid of what we’d say. Katie Kacvinsky
• A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself. Tom Stoppard
• Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. Margaret Chittenden

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Here are yet more forms and signs of madness

• Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable. Voltaire
• But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Edmund Burke
• It is madness for sheep to talk peace with a wolf. Thomas Fuller
• It is madness to make fortune the mistress of events, because by herself she is nothing and is ruled by prudence. John Dryden
• When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. To seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be! Dale Wasserman
• Mad is the man who is forever gritting his teeth against that granite block, complete and changeless, of the past. Antoine de Saint- Exupery
• Innocence is a kind of insanity. Graham Greene
• Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be. Don Quixote
• The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one’s designs to one’s means. Napoleon Bonaparte
• There is no such thing as ‘too insane’ unless others turn up dead due to your actions. Mahatma Gandhi
• What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness. Friedrich Nietzsche

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Fend off insanity through laughter and humour

• Humor is that which most efficiently recognizes that we are living in an imperfect world, with imperfect arguments and things that are insane, illogical, and irrational. And the only way we can live with that fact is to laugh. Barsoux
• If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane. Robert Frost
• If I couldn’t laugh I just would go insane, If we couldn’t laugh we just would go insane, If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane. Jimmy Buffett
• Laughter,  Humour

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Fend off insanity through connection with friends

• A good friend is a connection to life- a tie to the past,a road to the future,the key to sanity in a totally insane world. Lois Wyse
• Friendship

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Fend off insanity through patience

• Patience is serenity in the face of insanity. Anne Wilson Schaef
• Patience

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Fend off insanity through experimentation

• Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos. David Cronenberg
• Experimentation

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Fend of insanity through writing

• Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. Graham Greene
• Writing

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Fend of insanity by learning to watch your thoughts with detachment

• I’m simply saying that there is a way to be sane. I’m saying that you can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes. It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process. It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great suprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, A watcher. And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty.  That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.  Osho
• Non-attachment,  Awareness

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Fend off and heal insanity by recognising it

• To recognize one’s own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence. Eckhart Tolle
• Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy. Nora Ephron
• Can you go cazy without knowing you’re crazy? Laurie Faria Stolarz

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A little bit of madness is by no means a bad thing

• Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. Marilyn Monroe
• Only the insane have strength enough to survive. Only the survivors determine what is sane.
• Sanity is madness put to good use. George Santayana
• So long as man is protected by madness – he functions – and flourishes. Emile M. Cioran
• Without madness what is man But a wholesome beast, Postponed corpse that begets? Fernando Pessoa

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Madness, at times, can be far more pleasant than constant sanity

• I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. Edgar Allan Poe
• There is no insanity so devastating in man’s life as utter sanity. William Allen White
• I do not suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it. Edgar Allan Poe
• There is a pleasure sure, in being mad, which none but madmen know! John Dryden
• Madness hath imaginary bliss, and most men have no more. Martin Farquhar Tupper

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A little bit of madness can have a kind of charm

• Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting. John Russell
• The insane, on occasion, are not without their charms. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• Every man has his follies – and often they are the most interesting thing he has got. Josh Billings
• Sane is boring. R.A. Salvatore

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A little bit of madness reveals the soul

• It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed. Thomas Moore
• No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. Aristotle
• What is madness but nobility of soul. At odds with circumstance? Theodore Roethke
• The soul

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A little bit of madness assists change

• All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive. Yann Martel
• You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. Thomas Sankara
• Change

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A little bit of madness sets you free

• A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free. Nikos Kazantzakis
• I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. Kahlil Gibran
• In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom. J. G. Ballard
• Julian spoke with the clear, unequivocal lucidity of madmen who have escaped the hypocrisy of having to abide by a reality that makes no sense. Carlos Ruiz Zafón
• Freedom

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A little bit of madness can bring break throughs, sometimes even in reason

• Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death. R. D. Lang
• The world has always gone through periods of madness so as to advance a bit on the road to reason. Hermann Broch
• Reason

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A little bit of madness brings, at times, extreme intelligence and, at other times, absurdity

• Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. Edgar Allan Poe
• Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence. Edgar Allan Poe
• The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness. Jean Cocteau
• Crazy people are considered mad by the rest of the society only because their intelligence isn’t understood. Weihui Zhou
• Madness is the acme of intelligence. Naguib Mahfouz
• Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism. Criss Jami
• Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence. Or insanity. Richard Kadrey
• Intelligence

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A little bit of madness brings vigour and enthusiasm

• Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane. Henry Miller
• In things pertaining to enthusiasm, no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions. Henry Ward Beecher
• Was I ever crazy? Maybe. Or maybe life is… Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. Susanna Kaysen
• Madness is an excited mind, indulging in the dreams of imagination, until the heated fancy makes chimeras appear real. Charles William Day
• So long as man is protected by madness, he functions and flourishes. Emil Cioran
• No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions. Henry Ward Beecher
• Enthusiasm,  Vitality

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A little bit of madness is needed to do and create truly great things

• You need a little bit of insanity to do great things. Henry Rollins
• Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason. André Gide
• Seems to me that there is a fine line between insanity and dedication…I call that line commitment. Jeremy Aldana
• To be a top performer you have to be passionately committed to what you’re doing and insanely confident about your ability to pull it off. John Eliot, Ph.D.
• In order to act, you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking. George Clemenceau
• In things pertaining to enthusiasm, no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions. Henry Ward Beecher
• You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission. Flannery O’Connor
• The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. Andre Gide
• You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. Thomas Sankara
• To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you’re completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction, there’s no point to continue. Jennifer Salaiz
• The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way is the one that achieves madness. Mick Jagger
• Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. Virginia Woolf
• Greatness

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A little bit of madness encourages creativity and imagination

• For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity. Jean Dubuffet
• The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. Andre Gide
• Creativity,  Imagination

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Madness is always preferable to stupidity

• I’ll take crazy over stupid any day. Joss Whedon
• Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid. Heinrich Heine
• Stupidity

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There is a fine line between genius and insanity

• No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. Aristotle
• The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success. Bruce Feirstein
• There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line. Oscar Levant
• Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide. John Dryden
• Some were brilliant bordering on genius. Others, genius bordering on madness. Erich Segal
• There is no great genius without a mixture of madness. Aristotle
• “There is no genius free from some tincture of madness. Seneca
• No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness. Aristotle
• Human beings have speculated about the relationship between inspiration and insanity for centuries. Patty Duke
• Genius is one of the many forms of insanity. Cesare Lombroso
• The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom. Philip K. Dick
• I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity. William Blake
• There has never been any great genius without a spice of madness. Seneca
• Supposedly there’s an actual, researched link between extreme creativity and mental illness, and I believe it because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Deb Caletti
• One man’s insanity is another man’s genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.
• Genius

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Insanity is to art what garlic is to salad

• All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art. Roman Payne
• We work in the dark, We do what we can, We give what we have, Our doubt is our passion, And our passion is our task, The rest is the madness of art. Henry James
• What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. Augustus Saint-Gaudens
• The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. Christopher Morley
• It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill- it’s a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I’m all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I’ll always remain half crazy.  Vincent van Gogh

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Never be too ready to dismiss someone as crazy or mad

• In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. Oscar Wilde
• One is always considered mad when one perfects something that others cannot grasp. Ed Wood
• The worst thing to call somebody is crazy. It’s dismissive. “I don’t understand this person. So they’re crazy.” That’s bullshit. These people are not crazy. They’re strong people. Maybe their environment is a little sick. Dave Chappelle
• Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music. Angela Monet
• Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong. George Orwell
• Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. Apple Inc.

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Sanity and insanity is in the eye of the beholder …

• I would say any behavior that is not the status quo is interpreted as insanity, when, in fact, it might actually be enlightenment. Insanity is sorta in the eye of the beholder. Chuck Palahniuk
• One person’s craziness is another person’s reality. Tim Burton
• “Belane, are you nuts?” “Who knows? Insanity is comparative. Who sets the norm?”  Charles Bukowski
• Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

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… and there’s a very fine line between the two

• The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom. Philip K. Dick
• THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. Hunter S. Thompson
• The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane. Hunter S. Thompson
• There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line. Oscar Levant
• There’s a very fine line between a groove and a rut; a fine line between eccentrics and people who are just plain nuts. Christine Lavin

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Everyone is at least partly insane to some extent

• The real difference between men is not sanity and insanity, but more or less insanity. Austin O’Malley
• Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now. Mark Twain
• It is a proven fact that everyone on this earth has some bit of madness within their soul. I am no exception and neither are you. Matthew Hunt
• If you think anyone is sane you just don’t know enough about them. Christopher Moore
• We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• All of us are crazy in one way or another. Yiddish Proverb
• Everyone is more or less mad on one point. Rudyard Kipling
• I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people. Desiderius Erasmus
• I teach that all men are mad. Horace
• It is a common calamity; at some one time we have all been mad. Baptista Mantuanus
• We are all born mad. Some remain so. Samuel Beckett
• We’re all a little wacko sometimes, and if we think we’re not, maybe we are more than we know. Mariah Carey
• All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. Yann Martel
• You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are. Lewis Carroll
• I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats. Bram Stoker, Dracula

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In fact, some argue the whole world is insane …

• My dear Sir, take any road, you can’t go amiss. The whole state is one vast insane asylum. James L. Petigru
• The way it is now, the asylums can hold all the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials. Mark Twain
• You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody’s crazy. Charles Manson
• Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it. John Lennon
• We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• The sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanities. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• I guess if everybody went crazy together nobody would notice. Cormac Mccarthy
• Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity? Jon Ronson
• Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren’t we all just a little crazy? Libba Bray
• Insanity is universal. Sanity is rare. Yet there is hope, because the moment we perceive our insanity, we are on the way to sanity. Nisargadatta Maharaj

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… for it’s highly possible we are all equally deluded

• 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

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Insanity is uncommon in individuals but common in groups and nations

• Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. Friedrich Nietzsche
• Do you think it’s possible for an entire nation to be insane? Terry Pratchett
• Sometimes the crowd is the madness – at others it’s the absence of the crowd that is. Will Self
• Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals – as Marx averred – is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he. Will Self
• Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one. Charles MacKay

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Embrace your own spark of madness

• Embrace your inner lunatic. Fun times guaranteed. Derek Landy
• If only everyone could know and live with their inner craziness. Would the world be a worse place for it? No, people would be fairer and happier. Paulo Coelho
• You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it. Robin Williams
• 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. Douglas Adams

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Don’t hide your madness from others

• Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness. Allen Ginsberg

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Let there be method in your madness

• Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t. William Shakespeare
• There nearly always is a method in madness. G.K. Chesterton

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It’s not easy to stay sane in an insane world …

• Its not easy to stay sane in a world that offers such a wonderful choice of madness. Ashleigh Brilliant
• When you’re the only sane person, you look like the only insane person. Criss Jami
• In a mad world, only the mad are sane. Akira Kurosawa
• Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? Susanna Kaysen
• As a whole part of psychological education it needs to be remembered that a neurosis can be valuable; also that adjustment to a sick and insane environment is of itself not health but sickness and insanity. James Agee
• Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone. Baltasar Gracian
• In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. Saul Bellow

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… for insanity is extremely catching

• Insanity is catching. Terry Pratchett
• Insanity is contagious. Joseph Heller
• Madness breeds madness. Dan Brown

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In an insane world, the only way to stay sane is to be a little crazy

• Part of being sane, is being a little bit crazy. Janet Long
• I may be crazy but it keeps me from going insane. Waylon Jennings
• In this world, you gotta be a little crazy or you’ll go nuts.
• No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on the proper occasions. Henry Ward Beecher
• See what I mean? You gotta be crazy. Ain’t no time to be sane. Robin McLaurim Williams

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In an insane world, sometimes madness is the most sane response …

• I did learn something about insanity while I was down there. People go crazy, not because they are crazy, but because it’s the best available option at the time. Gabrielle Zevin
• It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. Philip K. Dick
• I wish you’d help me look into a more interesting problem – namely, my sanity. Kurt Vonnegut
• Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world. R. D. Laing
• Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society. Thomas Szas
• When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane. Hermann Hesse
• Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone. Baltasar Gracian
• You should humor crazy people when you’re at their mercy. Laurell K. Hamilton
• Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness. Blaise Pascal

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… for when the majority are insane, it’s the sane who are labelled as mad

• The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. Marcus Aurelius
• When you’re the only sane person, you look like the only insane person. Criss Jami
• If the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital. Horace Mann
• They call me mad, while they are all mad themselves. Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus)
• If the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital. Horace Mann

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In an insane world, finding a pocket of sanity can be life’s greatest blessing

• When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event. Like Robinson Crusoe’s discovery of footprints on the sand. Robert M. Pirsig

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Dreaming lets us be insane every night

• Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night. Charles Fisher
• Dreams

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Only true insanity can’t recognise itself

• When you are mad, mad like this, you don’t know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else’s reality, it’s still reality to you. Marya Hornbacher
• A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves. Agatha Christie

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Mothers are all slightly insane

• Mothers are all slightly insane. J. D. Salinger
• If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers. Edgar Watson Howe
• Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children. Sam Levenson

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• Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane. P. Lovecraft
• Being an expert on insanity doesn’t make you sane.
• Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind. Terry Pratchett
• Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.
• I do not suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it. Edgar Allan Poe
• I don’t suffer from insanity. I enjoy every minute of it.
• I hate to advocate drugs alcohol violence or insanity to anyone but they’ve always worked for me. Hunter S. Thompson
• I like fruit baskets because it gives you the ability to mail someone a piece of fruit without appearing insane. Demetri Martin
• I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me. Hunter S. Thompson
• I’m not suffering from insanity, I’m enjoying every minute of it.
• If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane. Jimmy Buffett
• If you think you’ve gone insane … you’re nuts. Stephen King
• In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. Oscar Wilde
• Insane people are always sure that they are fine; it is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy. Nora Ephron
• Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world. D. Laing
• Insanity doesn’t run in my family; it gallops. Cary Grant
• Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups parties nations and epochs it is the rule.   Friedrich Nietzsche
• Insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
• Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
• Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children. Sam Levenson
• Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein
• Insanity: Grounds for divorce in some states; grounds for marriage in all
• Insanity: Knowing that what you’re doing is completely idiotic but still somehow you just can’t stop it.
• Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage. Ambrose Bierce
• More people are driven insane through religious hysteria than by drinking alcohol. C. Fields
• Ordinarily he was insane but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid. Heinrich Heine
• The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane. Mark Twain
• There is a thin line between genius and insanity and in Larry’s case it was sometimes so thin you could see him drifting back and forth. Leo Durocher
• There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line. Oscar Levant
• Those who dance are considered insane by those who cannot hear the music. George Carlin
• Went to court for a parking ticket . I pleaded insanity. Steven Wright
• What garlic is to salad insanity is to art. Augustus Saint-Gaudens
• When you’re the only sane person, you look like the only insane person. Criss Jami
• Drunkenness is nothing but voluntary madness. Seneca the Elder
• Its not easy to stay sane in a world that offers such a wonderful choice of madness. Ashleigh Brilliant
• Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.
• Rum: Generically fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers. Ambrose Bierce
• You enter into a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets. Nora Ephron
• Don’t get even, get mad. Frank Sinatra
• Embrace your inner lunatic. Fun times guaranteed. Derek Landy
• He’s as nutty as a vegan T-bone. David Sedaris
• I do not have OCD OCD OCD. Emilie Autumn
• I should never be left alone with my mind for too long. Libba Bray
• If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up. Hunter S. Thompson
• In Hollywood if you don’t have a shrink, people think you’re crazy. Johnny Carson
• In this world, you gotta be a little crazy or you’ll go nuts.
• Oh, and I certainly don’t suffer from schizophrenia. I quite enjoy it. And so do I. Emilie Autumn
• Perfect sanity is a myth propagated by straitjacket salesmen. Rebecca McKinsey
• The only difference between me and a madman is I’m not mad. Salvador Dalí
• The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept. George Carlin
• The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they’re ok, then it’s you. Rita Mae Brown
• We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville. Jim Butcher
• Where to look if you’ve lost your mind? Bernard Malamud
• You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are. Lewis Carroll

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