117 Quotes About Insanity

Insanity has long fascinated thinkers, writers, and philosophers, serving as both a cautionary tale and a source of inspiration. As we navigate the blurred lines between genius and madness, we often find profound wisdom in the words of artists and intellectuals who have pondered the nature of the human mind. This curated collection of 117 quotes about insanity offers a journey through thoughts and reflections that challenge conventional understanding. Delve into these musings to uncover insights that illuminate the complexities of sanity, offering both solace and provocation as you explore the enigmatic depths of the mind.

1. “Rage — whether in reaction to social injustice, or to our leaders’ insanity, or to those who threaten or harm us — is a powerful energy that, with diligent practice, can be transformed into fierce compassion.” - Bonnie Myotai Treace

2. “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” - Philip K. Dick

3. “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” - Edgar Allan Poe

4. “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

5. “There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.” - Oscar Levant

6. “Unfortunately, Susan didn't remember what Jane Fulton once said, 'Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” - Rita Mae Brown

7. “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

8. “Insanity is catching.” - Terry Pratchett

9. “The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.” - Bruce Feirstein

10. “Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?” - Terry Pratchett

11. “Now this is the point. You fancy me a mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded...” - Edgar Allan Poe

12. “There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.” - Zoe Heller

13. “I mean, maybe I am crazy. I mean, maybe. But if this is all there is, then I don't want to be sane.” - Neil Gaiman

14. “First sign of madness, talking to your own head.” - J.K. Rowling

15. “Don’t you know what god is? God is everything and God is nothing; for the perfection created by man cannot be anything other than nothing. They decided to give a name to nothingness, and thereby the made it become something. Like you… God, who is nothing, can no longer be nothing since he is God. You could be a god for men. They need to give a body to nothingness so that nothingness can be seen and touched-at least with the imagination.” - Aldo Palazzeschi

16. “Mad Hatter: “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “What’s the answer?”“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter” - Lewis Carroll

17. “I'll take crazy over stupid any day.” - Joss Whedon

18. “Innocence is a kind of insanity” - Graham Greene

19. “I attributed the incidence to temporary insanity, and in my own defense, I'd like to say I haven't run over anyone since.” - Janet Evanovich

20. “Do you think it's possible for an entire nation to be insane?” - Terry Pratchett

21. “The prince of darkness is a gentleman!” - William Shakespeare

22. “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

23. “Oh, my dear, if you only knew how strange is the matter regarding which I am here, it is you who would laugh. I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane.” - Bram Stoker

24. “God made them as stubble to our swords.” - Oliver Cromwell

25. “If they [Plato and Aristotle] wrote about politics it was as if to lay down rules for a madhouse.And if they pretended to treat it as something really important it was because they knew that the madmen they were talking to believed themselves to be kings and emperors. They humoured these beliefs in order to calm down their madness with as little harm as possible.” - Blaise Pascal

26. “I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

27. “You think I'm deranged! How refreshing. Everyone here takes me so seriously, it's a wonderful change to be thought mentally deficient.” - Katie MacAlister

28. “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

29. “I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale."George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot . . .PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . .So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.” - Kurt Vonnegut

30. “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

31. “She was hearing the words. They just weren't registering on her Richter scale of sanity.” - Dakota Cassidy

32. “The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.” - Edgar Allan Poe

33. “I was also supposed to quiz my various companions on a number of important matters such as nostalgia, fear of unknown animals, food fantasies, nocturnal emissions, hobbies, choice of radio program, changes in out look and so forth.” - Vladimir Nabokov

34. “He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it... he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.” - Donald Barthelme

35. “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

36. “One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” - Nikola Tesla

37. “The thoughts written on the walls of madhouses by their inmates might be worth publicizing.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

38. “For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.” - Jean Dubuffet

39. “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

40. “Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics - in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.” - Susanna Clarke

41. “Time and I have quarrelled. All hours are midnight now. I had a clock and a watch, but I destroyed them both. I could not bear the way they mocked me.” - Susanna Clarke

42. “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

43. “Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing.” - Penelope Fitzgerald

44. “Awareness is the enemy of sanity, for once you hear the screaming, it never stops.” - Emilie Autumn

45. “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 Zafon

46. “In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.” - Johnny Carson

47. “Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.” - Rohinton Mistry

48. “and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks.” - Douglas Adams

49. “It was only vanity and discouragement that sometimes made me feel alone with my endless love, but now that I was taking one of the risks my heart had urged upon me I could also feel I was not alone. If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life. After all, the intimations of endless love were the same now as they were thousands of years before, while normal life had changed a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Which then, was more real?” - Scott Spencer

50. “Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the insane tended to give off a palpable, vibrating allure, a kind of animal magnetism that kept them loved by someone. How else could they survive at all? Someone had to hide them from the authorities! Hence the necessity and prevalence of sex appeal for people who were wild and on the edge.” - Lorrie Moore

51. “I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin.” - Augusten Burroughs

52. “You need to be clever to best him. Are you clever, Rachel?”Oh God. She wants to know if I’m clever. I glanced at Al, and he stared at me, then shrugged. Licking my lips, I said, “It’s the shiny pot that puts a hole in the sky.”Al’s mouth dropped open, but Newt thought about it, her expression thoughtful and her fingers finally leaving her knife. “Very true,” she said as she eased back into the cushions.With a soft click of his teeth, Al’s mouth shut. His eyes were cross, and he seemed peeved that I’d found a way to satisfy her without compromising myself at all.” - Kim Harrison

53. “Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night.” - Charles Fisher

54. “Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity...edit one more time!” - CK Webb

55. “Insanity is the ability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.” - Paulo Coelho

56. “Perhaps true faith is a form of insanity.” - Kristine Kathryn Rusch

57. “You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.” - Stephen King

58. “We never end up with the book we began writing. Characters twist it and turn it until they get the life that is perfect for them. A good writer won't waste their time arguing with the characters they create...It is almost always a waste of time and people tend to stare when you do!” - CK Webb

59. “I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.” - Charles Baudelaire

60. “When enough insane people scream in harmony that they really are healthy, they can actually start to believe themselves. Or put even more simply: people with overlapping delusions get along wonderfully.” - Daniel Mackler

61. “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

62. “Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.” - Megan Chance

63. “Seems to me that there is a fine line between insanity and dedication…I call that line commitment” - Jeremy Aldana

64. “Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.” - G.K. Chesterton

65. “All over America, people were pulling credentials out of their pockets and sticking them under someone else's nose to prove they had been somewhere or done something. And I thought someday everyone in America will suddenly jump up and say, 'I don't take any shit!' and start pushing and cursing and clawing at the man next to him.” - William S. Burroughs

66. “This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here.” - Terry Pratchett

67. “This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.” - Rene Daumal

68. “Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.” - Criss Jami

69. “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 strong people. Maybe their environment is a little sick.” - Dave Chappelle

70. “I wonder how long it would take him to realize I'm right as sin - it's the rest of the world that's wrong. I'm not even sure how I qualify for admission to Aspen Springs. Does wanting to die equal losing your mind?” - Ellen Hopkins

71. “After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I'd have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.” - Mark Vonnegut

72. “Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.” - Mark Vonnegut

73. “Men were always quick to believe in the madness of women.” - Alison Goodman

74. “Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren't? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?” - Susanna Kaysen

75. “One of the better definitions of insanity - doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting the result to be different.” - Anthony Kiedis

76. “That's why crazy people are so dangerous. You think they're nice until they're chaining you up in the garage.” - Michael Buckley

77. “I'm talking to myself in two different personas now. I'm reaching for a full-throttle meltdown and why not? Why stop halfway? Why not just go for it, jump on and ride the wave?” - C.K. Kelly Martin

78. “He mouths something. Six words. Six words that seem too impossible to be true. Six words that bleed hope into my soul. Six words. “You’re not crazy. I love you.” - Lauren Hammond

79. “The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound;these are the sounds of dead voices on dead recordsfloating down the broken shaft of memory.When I turn to you to ask if you remember,When I turn to you in our bed” - Stephen King

80. “have you taken leave of your senses” - Charles Dickens

81. “Writers Are Insane. For months we are lone wolves locked in our caves. Then overnight we become publicity hounds. It's a schizophrenic business.” - Robert Mykle

82. “People say 'I love Artists', but what they really know about Artists? They've ever thought about sharing the real madness with us? I believe those extreme passions/emotions in me separated from the real world is the sauce to pull out the inspirations out of me that touch the core of people's hearts, which is usually wandering about deep inside of you unconsciously covered with the social taboo called 'common sense'.” - Hiroko Sakai

83. “Addy, living one day without you would never be for the best. I want you every minute of every day. Forever. I love you.” - Lauren Hammond

84. “Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe.” - Christopher Hill

85. “If flatness were funny, a dinner plate would be hilarious.” - Walter Moers

86. “Those with the money are eccentric. Those without, insane.” - Bruce Robinson

87. “Dreaming permits each and everyone of us to be quietly insane every night of out lives.” - William Dement

88. “Everyone is more or less mad on one point.” - Rudyard Kipling

89. “Everybody looks a little crazy if you're looking close enough and if you can't look that close, then you don't really love them.” - Chuck Palahniuk

90. “You walk a fine line between beautifully macabre and uncharacteristically psychotic.” - Solange nicole

91. “Schizofrenia pana la ultima ei limita, refuzul total al oricarei realitati decat cea a visului, al oricarui adevar decat al viziunii.” - gellu naum

92. “She stopped shrieking after a moment. It wasn't the crazy looks she drew from the other pedestrians that made her stop. And her damaged sanity hadn't managed to repair itself. She'd left something behind in that apartment. Something she'd always taken for granted. Faith in a rational world. It was like a tiny cog had been removed from her brain, and all the gears were still working, but a slight wobble was slowly and inevitably stripping the teeth until one day, without warning the Rube Goldberg device that was her mind would fall apart with a loud SPROING.” - A. Lee Martinez

93. “Nobody's sane above the law.” - Toba Beta

94. “You see, insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.” - Joseph Kesselring

95. “We all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity. The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity?” - G.K. Chesterton

96. “Insanity is the greatest gift of humanity, for insanity talks to the mind of the delusion.” - Lionel Suggs

97. “I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes that half led me to imagine she was not.” - Edgar Allan Poe

98. “Kyubey: ...Oh, geez. I never would have thought you capable of throwing your friend off a bridge. That wasn't a sane act, Madoka!” - Magica Quartet

99. “You're bloody insane, Karede," Mat said. "Unfortunately, so am I.” - Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson

100. “Your own brain ought to have the decency to be on your side!” - Terry Pratchett

101. “You have lost your mind,"Jamie said coldly, the shock receding slightly. "Or I should think you had, if ye had one to lose.” - Diana Gabaldon

102. “Don't you just hate it when real life gets in the way of your own reality.” - Menna Anwar

103. “Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky.” - Lauren DeStefano

104. “I'm all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear, nothing of all its due but fear centupled, fear of its shadow, no, blind from birth, of sound then, if you like, we'll have that, one must have something, it's a pity, but there it is, fear of sound, fear of sounds, the sounds of beasts, the sounds of men, sounds in the daytime and sounds at night, that's enough, fear of sounds all sounds, more or less, more or less fear, all sounds, there's only one, continuous, day and night, what is it, it's steps coming and going, it's voices speaking for a moment, it's bodies groping their way, it's the air, it's things, it's the air among the things, that's enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek, no, what I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, they say I seek what it is I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, what it can possibly be, and where it can possibly come from, since all is silent here, and the walls thick, and how I manage, without feeling an ear on me, or a head, or a body, or a soul, how I manage, to do what, how I manage, it's not clear, dear dear, you say it's not clear, something is wanting to make it clear, I'll seek, what is wanting, to make everything clear, I'm always seeking something, it's tiring in the end, and it's only the beginning.” - Samuel Beckett

105. “You're insane!""I won't argue that point.” - Ray Bradbury

106. “That's crazier than a boatload of prostitutes!” - J. Richard Singleton

107. “He laughed a little, in an odd, nervous kind of way. "Because if I don't get going soon, the whole impetus may die--and if that happens, well, I really shall consider a long, restful plunge into insanity. Sometimes the abyss yawns very attractively.” - Dodie Smith

108. “Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity” - Aldous Huxley

109. “I wondered if perhaps I'd gone mad. I had known this man less than twenty-four hours and already I wanted to raise his children.” - Lucy Robinson

110. “And I do. I do wonder, I think about it all the time. What it would be like to kill myself. Because I never really know, I still can't tell the difference, I'm never quite certain whether or not I'm actually alive. I sit here every single day. Run, I said to myself. Run until your lungs collapse, until the wind whips and snaps at your tattered clothes, until you're a blur that blends into the background. Run, Juliette, run faster, run until your bones break and your shins split and your muscles atrophy and your heart dies because it was always too big for your chest and it beat too fast for too long and you run.Run run run until you can't hear their feet behind you. Run until they drop their fists and their shouts dissolve in the air. Run with your eyes open and your mouth shut and dam the river rushing up behind your eyes. Run, Juliette.Run until you drop dead. Make sure your heart stops before they ever reach you. Before they ever touch you.Run, I said.” - Tahereh Mafi

111. “I was perfectly calm and perfectly insane, perfectly prepared to accept what the moment had offered. Indifference of that magnitude is rare and because it can be achieved only by someone ready to let go of who he is, it demands respect. It inspires awe in those who gaze upon it.” - Paul Auster

112. “He found insanity no excuse, however, for irrational behavior.” - Brandon Sanderson

113. “Was it possible that perhaps the most plausible explanation was being offered by someone who anyone with an ounce of sanity would have long ago consigned to the realm of the insane?” - Tim Horvath

114. “I took a few dragging steps toward the locker-room door. 'You're doing something to me that I wouldn't do to a dog,' I mumbled. 'What you're doing to me is worse than if you were to kill me. You're locking me up in shadows for the rest of my life. You're taking my mind away from me. You're condemning me slowly but surely to madness, to being without a mind. It won't happen right away, but sooner or later, in six months or in a year - Well, I guess that's that.'I fumbled my way out of the locker room and down the passageway outside, guiding myself with one arm along the wall, and past the sergeant's desk and down the steps, and then I was out in the street.("All At Once, No Alice")” - Cornell Woolrich

115. “Daca schizofrenia este universala, atunci marele artist este cu adevarat cel care sparge zidul schizofrenic, ajungand in patria necunoscuta, acolo unde el nu mai apartine niciunei epoci, niciunui mediu, niciunei scoli.” - Gilles Deleuze Felix Guattari

116. “From around the corner's edge a grotesque light was trickling out, the first intimations of an ominous sunrise over a dark horizon. I dimly recognized this colored light, though not from my waking memory. It grew more intense, now pouring out in weird streams from beyond the solid margin of the building. And the more intense it grew, the more clearly I could hear the screaming voice that had called out to me in a dream. I shouted his name, but the swelling colored brightness was a field of fear which kept me from making any move toward it. It was no amalgam of colors comparable to anything in mortal experience. It was as if all natural colors had been mutated into a painfully lush iridescence by some prism fantastically corrupted in its form; it was a rainbow staining the sky after a poison deluge; it was an aurora painting the darkness with a blaze of insanity, a blaze that did not burn vigorously but shimmered with an insect-jeweled frailness. And, in actuality, it was nothing like these color-filled effusions, which are merely a feeble means of partially fixing a reality uncommunicable to those not initiated to it, a necessary resorting to the makeshift gibberish of the mystic isolated by his experience and left without a language to describe it.("The Dreaming In Nortown")” - Thomas Ligotti

117. “Thinking you might be crazy can drive you crazy.” - Karl Marlantes