sanity

For, what is order without common sense, but Bedlam__ 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.

Sanity is transmuting all the insane parts of your brain into a creative outlet.

We are all a little schizophrenic. Each of us has three different people living inside us every day__ho you were, who you are and who you will become. The road to sanity is to recognize those identities, in order to know who you are today.

Writing is a solitary existence, especially if you forget to chat to your friends _ sorry, I meant characters.

What I'd like to read is a scientific review, by a scientific psychologist--if any exists--of 'A Scientific Man and the Bible'. By what route do otherwise sane men come to believe such palpable nonsense? How is it possible for a human brain to be divided into two insulated halves, one functioning normally, naturally and even brilliantly, and the other capable only of such ghastly balderdash which issues from the minds of Baptist evangelists? Such balderdash takes various forms, but it is at its worst when it is religious. Why should this be so? What is there in religion that completely flabbergasts the wits of those who believe in it? I see no logical necessity for that flabbergasting. Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for. In other fields such hypotheses are common, and yet they do no apparent damage to those who incline to them. But in the religious field they quickly rush the believer to the intellectual Bad Lands. He not only becomes anaesthetic to objective fact; he becomes a violent enemy of objective fact. It annoys and irritates him. He sweeps it away as something somehow evil...

I would much rather have my grotesque products of the imagination compared to your delusional sanity.

The hardest thing for a sane person to do is not care what anyone thinks, although everyone swears by it, hence our glorification of insanity.

I wasn't convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I'm not sure that's true. I still think about it. I'll always have to think about it.

Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity

If you think people in your life are normal, then you undoubtedly have not spent any time getting to know the abnormal side of them.

In any sane society, a farmer is a billion times more important than an economist.

A society, on occasion, can be the worst possible describer of mental health.

The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I__ a parent. And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization, you know__hat__l it be? Alienated, cynical intellectual? Or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high? There is not much choice in there, you see. And we all want our children to be well adjusted; unfortunately, there__ nothing to be well adjusted to!

We are poor indeed if we are only sane.

The "pathology of normalcy" rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.

If I'm all alone, then the standard for sanity is up to me entirely.

Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.

That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.