87 Quotes On Maintaining Sanity

In today's fast-paced world, where life's demands can often feel overwhelming, maintaining sanity is a sacred pursuit. Whether you're navigating the complexities of daily life, facing personal challenges, or striving to find peace amid chaos, words of wisdom can serve as a guiding light. We've meticulously gathered a collection of the top 87 quotes on maintaining sanity to inspire, comfort, and motivate you on your journey. These quotes, spanning various perspectives and experiences, offer valuable insights into preserving one's mental well-being and finding balance in the midst of adversity. Let these words be your solace and strength as you endeavor to sustain your serenity and clear mind.

1. “Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!” - Dale Wasserman

2. “The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad!” - Salvador Dali

3. “When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

4. “One person's craziness is another person's reality.” - Tim Burton

5. “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

6. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.” - Shirley Jackson

7. “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

8. “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

9. “Sanity is a cozy lie.” - Susan Sontag

10. “The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.” - Charles Baxter

11. “Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.” - Dorothea Tanning

12. “Much Madness Is Divinest SenseMuch Madness is divinest Sense —To a discerning Eye —Much Sense — the starkest Madness —'Tis the MajorityIn this, as All, prevail —Assent — and you are sane —Demur — you're straightway dangerous —And handled with a Chain —” - Emily Dickinson

13. “Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am.” - J.K. Rowling

14. “When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.” - Hermann Hesse

15. “Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.” - George Eliot

16. “You're a very odd man," said Bert."I get that more often than you'd think," replied Charles.” - James A. Owen

17. “I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.” - Margaret Atwood

18. “We formed the fellowship of the ring when we should've all just gone on medication” - Nancy Werlin

19. “Where to look if you've lost your mind?” - Bernard Malamud

20. “What I cannot love, I overlook.” - Anais Nin

21. “There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person.” - Dan Greenberg

22. “To be able to forget means sanity.” - Jack London

23. “People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them.” - Louis-Ferdinand Celine

24. “Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.” - Douglas Adams

25. “Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.” - Terry Pratchett

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

27. “In a mad world, only the mad are sane.” - Akira Kurosawa

28. “Longevity-and sanity. Eccentric old ladies on Harleys I can deal with.” - Alison Larkin

29. “Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.” - Jim Butcher

30. “I wonder if being sane means disregarding the chaos that is life, pretending only an infinitesimal segment of it is reality.” - Rabih Alameddine

31. “The point is, you see," said Ford, "that 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

32. “For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam’s front parlor? What is imagination without common sense, but the aspiration to out-dandy Beau Brummell with nothing but a bit of faded muslin and a limp cravat? What is Creation without common sense, but a scandalous thing without form or function, like a matron with half a dozen unattached daughters?And God looked upon the Creation in all its delightful multiplicity, and saw that, all in all, it was quite Amiable.” - Vera Nazarian

33. “People who're nuts never doubt their own sanity. (The Killer's Cousin)” - Nancy Werlin

34. “As long as you doubt your sanity, you can't be insane.” - Miles Keaton Andrew

35. “I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.” - Allen Ginsberg

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

37. “As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.” - Alan Ayckbourn

38. “It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.” - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

39. “We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.” - George Eliot

40. “Everybody knows there is no such thing as normal. There is no black-and-white definition of normal. Normal is subjective. There's only a messy, inconsistent, silly, hopeful version of how we feel most at home in our lives.” - Tori Spelling

41. “To be physically astute and psychologically tended, yet morally insulated and conceptually blind--is to be crazy, not healthy.” - Michael Ventura

42. “The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.” - Stephen King

43. “I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?"Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard, "Yes, I'm afraid of spiders.""Were you always?""What are you, a psychiatrist?"Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine's eyes on him, appraising his line of questioning."Is it possible that the trauma of losing your best friend as a child and the trauma of losing your wife as an adult and the trauma of seeing Laine's husband take his life in front of you just recently..." Pritam shrugged and raised his palms, "You see where I'm going?"Nicholas looked at Laine. She watched back. Her gray eyes missed nothing."Sure," agreed Nicholas, standing. "And my sister's nuts, too, and we both like imagining that little white dogs are big nasty spiders because our daddy died and we never got enough cuddles.""Your father died?" asked Laine. "When?""Who cares?"Pritam sighed. "You must see this from our point of - ""I'd love to!" snapped Nicholas. "I'd love to see it from your point of view, because mine is not that much fun! It's insane! It's insane that I see dead people, Pritam! It's insane that this," he flicked out the sardonyx necklace,"stopped me from kidnapping a little girl!""That's what you believe," Pritam said carefully."That's what I fucking believe!" Nicholas stabbed his finger through the air at the dead bird talisman lying slack on the coffee table.” - Stephen M. Irwin

44. “Don't be ashamed of reliving your childhood, Ox, because all of us must do it now and then to maintain our sanity.” - Barry Hughart

45. “I say, thirteen is too many dogs for good mental health. Five is pretty much the limit. More than five dogs and you forfeit your right to call yourself entirely sane.Even if the dogs are small.” - E. Lockhart

46. “Got us a full moon too coming tomorrow night. Just make things a whole lot worse. All we need.- Why is that?- What’s that, Marshal?- The full moon. You think it makes people crazy?- I know it does.- Found a wrinkle in one of the pages and used his index finger to smooth it out.- How come?- Well, you think about it—the moon affects the tide, right?- Sure.- Has some sort of magnet effect or something on water.- I’ll buy that.- Human brain,- Trey said, - is over fifty percent water.- No kidding?- No kidding. You figure ol’ Mr. Moon can jerk the ocean around, think what it can do to the head.” - Dennis Lehane

47. “You knew then that this was not any kind of hospital that cured, but a hospital that held, that kept their patients away from the rest of the world, a kind of ark that floated along full of life, but not participating in life.... These people no longer made progress.” - Anne Spollen

48. “No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on the proper occasions."Henry Ward Beecher” - Henry Ward Beecher

49. “Don't be too hard on yourself! Sanity doesn't want to go haywire.” - Toba Beta

50. “Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left — sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible.” - G.K. Chesterton

51. “To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence.” - Eckhart Tolle

52. “Now, we shall be able to judge the extent of the spiritual undernourishment if we look at all these movements from another angle: not as errors but rather as attempts to find healing. I use this comparison: For a long time medical men combated fever as if it itself constituted the illness. Medicine today inclines rather to respect it, not only as a symptom of the disease but of the struggle of the organism against the disease. True, it is this struggle which makes it ill, and yet this very struggle is also the proof of its vitality and is the necessary way to healing.” - Paul Tournier

53. “I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance for the destiny of humanity) and a false idea (namely, that art is superfluous luxury).” - Paul Tournier

54. “Temporary Insanity had come a-knocking and I had shouted "Come on in the door is open." Luckily, Reality had come unexpectedly and found Temporary Insanity roaming the corridors of my mind unchecked, going into rooms, opening cupboards, reading my letters, looking in my underwear drawer, that kind of thing. Reality had run and got Sanity. And after a tussle, they both had managed to throw out Temporary Insanity and slam the door in his face. Temporary Insanity now lay on the gravel in the driveway of my mind, panting and furious, shouting, "She invited me in, you know. She asked me in. She wanted me there.” - Marian Keyes

55. “Compared to bipolar's magic, reality seems a raw deal. It's not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it's the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity - the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don't understand, we say. They just don't get it. They'll never be artists.” - David Lovelace

56. “The history of your world is filled with the voice of the victor, the voice of power, although it was not always a voice of sanity, by any means.” - Barbara Marciniak

57. “That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.” - Erich Fromm

58. “At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.” - George Orwell

59. “Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;” - Emile Durkheim

60. “You never know what lurks just beneath the surface of my fragile sanity.” - Ashly Lorenzana

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

62. “Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.” - Roger Zelazny

63. “Once upon a time there was aOnce upon a time there was aOnce upon a time there was aStop this. It's undignified.” - N.K. Jemisin

64. “Well, Daddy, I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.” - Tom Robbins

65. “... the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. [pp. 65-66]” - Anne Lamott

66. “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

67. “When the whole world is crazy, it doesn't pay to be sane.” - Terry Goodkind

68. “Sanity? Sorry, but I don't remember having such a useless thing in the first place.” - Kenpachi Zaraki

69. “There's a boy whose affection I am determined to hunt down and kill. It used to be material objects I felt I needed to be happy. It would make me feel stable if I had him. If I had someone like him, it would prove that I'm stable, and then I wouldn't have to do the work to get there. I am constantly looking for ways to cede control of my worries to someone, anyone.” - Emma Forrest

70. “People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.” - G.K. Chesterton

71. “The Amish are islands of sanity in a whirlpool of change.” - Nancy Sleeth

72. “The conundrum of sanity and insanity, is that it serves us to be some of each. It's really only a question of degrees. You cannot possibly be 100% adjusted and live in this INSANE world. A little bit of crazy is a coping skill.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

73. “And I still say it was just a coincidence;' he muttered pugnaciously. 'You say it too! Look at me and say it! It was just a coincidence. That happened to be the nearest place on the dial where they both met exactly, those two hands. My blows dented them. They got stuck there just as the works died, that was all. Stay sane whatever you do. Say it over and over. It was just a coincidence!'Outside the tall French windows, in the velvety night-sky, the stars in all their glory twinkled derisively in at them. ("Speak To Me Of Death")” - Cornell Woolrich

74. “People are all crazy... but the craziest are the ones who never allow themselves to be crazy.” - Paulo Coelho

75. “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

76. “Minds that have withered into psychosis are far more terrifying than any character of fiction.” - Christian Baloga

77. “If you were a sane woman, I would, of course, behave in a more rational fashion. Since you are a lunatic, however, this is the only way.” - Susan Elizabeth Phillips

78. “An idea can destroy the mind of a human being, twist it into a dark path of destruction and illness. But only the human can destroy the mind with a bullet to the soul. Ideas do not kill people; they ruin them. People kill people.” - Ingrid

79. “Do you have any idea how mad you sound?’‘Indeed I do. I have in moments of doubt considered the question of my sanity.’ (...)‘And?’‘Then I consider what a piece of work is man. How defective in reason, how mean his facilities, how ugly in form and movement, in action how like a devil, in apprehension how like a cow. The beauty of the world? The paragon of animals? To me the quintessence of dust.” - Paul Hoffman

80. “He couldn't even find the will to yell at her now. A real man didn't yell at those who weren't exactly sane themselves, he told himself.” - Lora Leigh

81. “If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views people in an asylum endlessly beating their heads against the wall.” - Randy Alcorn

82. “Worse than madness. Sanity.” - William Golding

83. “If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?” - Guillermo Cabrera Infante

84. “When you're the only sane person, you look like the only insane person.” - Criss Jami

85. “One secret of life is that the reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day. Another secret is that laughter is carbonated holiness” - Anne Lamott

86. “It’s a sad state of affairs when I’m the one bringing sanity to the equation” - M.A. George

87. “Where was the threshold, between the inner world and the outer one? We each move unthinkingly through this gateway every day, we use the passwords of grammar--I say, you say, he and she, it, on the other hand, does not say--paying for the privilege of sanity with common coin, with meanings we've agreed on.” - Margaret Atwood