C. K. Dexter Haven: [looking for the "hair of the dog"] Do you s'pose, sir, speaking of eye-openers...? Uncle Willie: Oh, that's the first sane remark I've heard today. C'malong, Dexter, I know a formula that's said to pop the pennies off the eyelids...
A bad man in Zion City is a good man in Chicago.
Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because a...
If the dog leads the man, the man is blind. If the man leads the dog, the man is married.
A young man idle, an old man needy.
The poor man and the rich man do not play together.
The rich man plans for tomorrow, the poor man for today.
A young man should not marry yet, an old man not at all.
It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people.
Damn it," I muttered. "What?" asked Adrian. "I hate when you're the sane one. That's my job." "Rose," he said, forcibly trying to keep a serious tone, "I can think of many words to describe you, and being at the top of the list. You know what's not o...
The Secret to saneful living is in the Key between these two worlds. In order to serve the higher ideal, one must revert to serving the Spark within all the multiplicities herein conceivable in the apparent world. The spark in itself is not contained...
If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views peo...
Watching movies simply is a promiscuous experience. The voracity it breeds! That quantity of quiddity compressed and quickened and sent at you! It's a little bit mad, isn't it, to hold a faithful flame for the one you've picked, when no such choice i...
Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever t...
Houdini, the magician who debunked magic, could not bear to see the great rationalist [Arthur Conan] Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds. And so he did what any friend would: He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the onl...
In a sane world, a term like "chronic crisis" would be instantly seen by anone as an oxymoron. Nevertheless, that's the state that many of us Western Worlders live in, provoking crisis after crisis so that we can justify our dis-ease rather than addr...
The psychologist Charles Moser, for example, pointed out that those inclined to divide the "sane" from the "insane" in terms of frequency of sex and intensity of desires overlook the possibility that sex itself may be the most meaningful part of a pe...
Crazy people made him crazy. It was as if he personally resented them giving into madness - in part, because he so frequently labored to behave sanely. When some people gave up the labor of sanity, or failed at it, Garp suspected them of not trying h...
Women cannot compete with men in physical prowess. And why in the name of all that is sane should we? Why not rather have our ambition go into sport for health, endurance, and the mere love of it?
[n regard to Jesus believing himself inspired] This belief carried no more personal imputation than the belief of Socrates that he was under the care and admonition of a guardian demon. And how many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of t...
The good part about having a mental disorder is having a valid reason for all the stupid things we do because of a damaged prefrontal cortex. However, the best part is seeing someone completely sane do the exact same things, without a valid excuse. T...
