Quotes about insanity

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

— Aristotle

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

— Antonin Artaud

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

— Samuel Beckett

The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means.

— Napoleon Bonaparte

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me: hell might afford my miseries a shelter; therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all bolted against me.

— William Cowper

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.

— T. S. Eliot

Insanity destroys reason, but not wit.

— Nathaniel Emmons

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

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get into accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

— Sigmund Freud

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

— Allen Ginsberg

Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.

— Baltasar Gracian

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

You want to hear about insanity? I was found running naked through the jungles in Mexico. At the Mexico City airport, I decided I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing on takeoff. My body... my liver... okay, my brain... went.

— Dennis Hopper

I teach that all men are mad.

— Horace

I may be crazy but it keeps me from going insane.

— Waylon Jennings

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

— Rudyard Kipling

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

— Oscar Levant

Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children.

— Samuel Levenson

I'm a nut, but not just a nut.

— Bill Murray

Insanity in individuals is something rare -- but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

If you commit a big crime then you are crazy, and the more heinous the crime the crazier you must be. Therefore you are not responsible, and nothing is your fault.

— Peggy Noonan

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

— Edgar Allan Poe

For virtue's self may too much zeal be had; the worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

— Alexander Pope

Whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.

— Proverb

Insanity is doing the same thing in the same way and expecting a different outcome.

— Chinese Proverb

All of us are crazy in one way or another.

— Yiddish Proverb

What is madness but nobility of soul. At odds with circumstance?

— Theodore Roethke

Though this be madness, yet there is method in it. [Hamlet]

— William Shakespeare

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

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

— Mark Twain

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.

— Mark Twain

How strange to have failed as a social creature -- even criminals do not fail that way -- they are the law's Loyal Opposition, so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.

— Source Unknown

Only the insane have strength enough to survive. Only the survivors determine what is sane.

— Source Unknown

There is no insanity so devastating in man's life as utter sanity.

— William Allen White

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays everybody's crazy.

— Charles Manson

You can say someone is crazy about anything.

— James Dye

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goeth