Quotes about Sanity

"Do you have trouble getting to sleep?"
"No," I said, "I want to sleep all the time."
"Well, you don't have the clinical signs of depression," he said,
clicking his pen.

I left then, for good,
and as I walked
the song broke through,
the loud green sound
of this garden called the earth,
the garden between my thighs.
The sky's spinning song
of light and dark:
a rocking in my blood,
the ocean's lowing like a cow
looking for her calf.

I sat and sang by the water's edge
where I knew he would not go.

I think the big danger of madness is not madness itself, but the habit of madness.  What I discovered during the time I spent in the asylum is that I could choose madness and spend my whole life without working, doing nothing, pretending to be mad.  It was a very strong temptation..

When there is daring, you dare to do something: you put forth your vision fearlessly. People have doubts about big vision because they don’t have a sense of gentleness in themselves first. So gentleness brings daring and a sense of fearlessness. Daring is appreciation of letting go in the fundamental sense. First you develop gentleness toward yourself; then you begin to develop daring, which is connected with how to express your gentleness to the world outside, how to proclaim your sanity. Your are not going crazy because you have seen the Great Eastern Sun, which is the symbol of expansive vision in the Shambhala world. Rather, because you have seen the Great Eastern Sun, you are very daring and at the same time very gentle and soft. The softer you become, the greater the message to the world becomes.

You may be right. I may be crazy.
But it just may be a lunatic you're looking for.

Our sanity depends essentially on a narrowness of vision - the ability to select the elements vital to survival, while ignoring the great truths.  So the individual lives his daily life, without due attention to the fact that he has no guarantee of tomorrow.  He hides from himself the knowledge that his life is a unique experience, which will end in the grave; that at every second, lives as unique as his start and end.  This blindness allows a pattern of living to hand itself on, and few who challenge this pattern survive.

Most of what I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday school. These are the things I learned: Share everything.
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere.  The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation.  Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.  Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm.  Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.  Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.  And it is true, no matter how old you are - when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

Only the half-mad are wholly alive.

  For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psycotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

It is not easy to become sane

Sanity is the playground for the unimaginative.

I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.

You want to raise your child in such a way that you don’t have to control him, so that he will be in full possession of himself at all times. Upon that depends his good behavior, his health, his sanity.

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.

"Turn to Nature for salvation of sanity."

Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.

Never accept an invitation to go crazy.

We can push our connectedness beyond sane and healthy limits.

See, the human mind is kind of like…a piñata. When it breaks open, there's a lot of surprises inside. Once you get the piñata perspective, you see that losing your mind can be a peak experience.

• 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

If ruling our world stems from developing certainty in our sanity, how do we discover it? The Shambhala teachings instruct us to "put our mind of fearfulness in the cradle of loving-kindnes."

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.

Sanity is a choice.

Much better to be crazy provided you know what/where sane is.

Wildness can be a way of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

Maybe in this mixed up, topsy turvy world of ours they should take all the 'sane' people off the streets and lock them up and let all the psychopaths out of the asylums to run the world.

So let me get this straight. You want to fly on a magic carpet to see the King of the Potato People and plead with him for your freedom, and you're telling me you're completely sane?

All my friends and I are crazy. That's the only thing that keeps us sane.

The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.

Sanity is a cozy lie.