A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King.
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
To the sober person adventurous conduct often seems insanity.
The difference between insanity and genius is measured only by success and failure.
The psychical condition of men's minds may be compared with a set of bells close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment. In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.
Whenever people ask me how I manage to get through this whole crazy time of being incredibly famous and sort of an icon and supposedly a role model and all of this insanity, I always cite my family and then books. I don't know what I would have done without books.
Some might think that the creativity, imagination, and flights of fancy that give my life meaning are insanity.
Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence. Or insanity.
Everybody's talkin' about me, I don't hear a word they're saying, only echoes on my mind.
I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside.
Insanity is in the eyes of the beholder. So I will continue to live my personal folly.
Excitable boy, they all said, he killed and raped her and brought her home.
All humanity could share a common insanity and be immersed in a common illusion while living in a common chaos. That can't be disproved, but we have no choice but to follow our senses.
Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.
Had that poor Reilly kook really been proud of Levy Pants? He had always said that he was. That was one good sign of his insanity.
Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness?
No religion I ever encountered made any sense. None are consistent. Most gods are megalomaniacs and paranoid psychotics by their worshippers' description. I don't see how they could survive their own insanity. But it's not impossible that human beings are incapable of interpreting a power so much greater than themselves. Maybe religions are twisted and perverted shadows of truth. Maybe there are forces which shape the world. I myself have never understood why, in a universe so vast, a god would care about something so trivial as worship or human destiny.
The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
So wie die Verruecktheit in einem hoeheren Sinn, der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, so ist die Schizophrenie der Anfang aller Kunst, aller Phantasie. (As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy. )