Quotes About Insanity

Insanity is a matter of degree.

— Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.

— Erich Fromm

Dr. Karl Menninger was once asked what action he would recommend if a person were to feel a nervous breakdown coming on.  “Lock up your house,” the famous psychiatrist advised, “go across the railroad tracks, and find someone in need and do something for him.”

The inmates are ghosts whose dreams have been murdered.

— Jill Johnson, about Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric wards

We’re all controlled neurotics.

— Harry Reasoner

There was only one catch, and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. . . . Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them.  If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.

— Joseph Heller

There is always some madness in love.  But there is also always some reason in madness.

— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Sometimes accidents happen in life from which we have need of a little madness to extricate ourselves successfully.

— Francois de La Rochefoucauld

What is madness?  To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them.

— Voltaire

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.

— Hermann Hesse

There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.

— G. K. Chesterton

We are all born mad.  Some remain so.

— Samuel Beckett

The human race consists of the dangerously insane and such as are not.

— Mark Twain

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Insanity is hereditary—you get it from your children.

— Sam Levenson

That’s the truest sign of insanity—insane people are always sure they’re just fine.  It’s only the sane people who are willing to admit they’re crazy.

— Nora Ephron