74 Quotes Tagged: sanity

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.

Sanity is, in essence, nothing more than the ability to live in harmony with nature's laws.

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

Worse than madness. Sanity.

I don't worry about what other people think of me. It's one of the things I most admired about my dad growing up. He didn't give a hoot what others thought. He was who he was. It's one of the qualities that has kept me most sane.

"If there is moral insanity," he said in a conspiratorial whisper, "then there may be the reverse, immoral sanity, if you will, that comes upon one suddenly, like a fever."

Any man who neglects his conscience is a dangerous animal.

Loving yourself isn’t vanity. It’s sanity.

Zaphod felt he was teetering on the edge of madness and wondered if he shouldn't just jump over and have done with it.

Of all the things a man may do, sleep probably contributes most to keeping him sane. It puts brackets about each day. If you do something foolish or painful today, you get irritated if somebody mentions it, today. If it happened yesterday, though, you can nod or chuckle, as the case may be. You've crossed through nothingness or dream to another island in Time.

I think of us as a people who inoculate ourselves against a plague of insanity with a powerful anti-idiotic called science fiction. I think sf is a literature which by its very nature requires that you be at least a little sane, that you know at least a little something. You must abdicate the right to be ignorant in order to enjoy science fiction, which most people are unwilling to do; and you must learn, if not actually how to think things through, at least what the trick looks like when it's done. Frequent injections will keep a lot of madness away.

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

I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.

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...