worldview and perspective on Insanity

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am ...

A time will come when the whole world will go mad. And to anyone who is not mad they will say: 'You are mad, for you are not like us.

A fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the worl...

If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last Supper is the Mad Tea Party. The world says, mind your own business, and Jesus says, there is no such thing as your own business. The w...

Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to bre...

Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate.

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a p...

The mind is an instrument of staggering potential, but its potential is not measured by IQ or academic degrees.

If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

The psychotherapist M. Scott Peck spent many years of his practice as an agnostic. He, along with thousands upon thousands of his colleagues were taught that evil was a social construct, and therefore...

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

The greatest of all illusions is the illusion of familiarity.

In a study conducted by Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, researchers discovered what most of us already know: people do not like to be left alone with their own tho...

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.

Entering the wilderness is a larger metaphor for dealing with our own demons, our own motivations, be they good or bad. In this short excerpt, Annie Dillard shares the value of entering the wilderness...

Stupidity and ignorance, even if chosen in response to warnings against pride of intellect, do not guarantee love or spirituality.

A man with so large a brain must have something in it.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.

Milton Rokeach wrote a book entitled The Three Christs of Ypsilanti….there were three patients in that hospital, each of whom thought he was Jesus Christ. One was too far gone in his psychotic isolati...

When Freud says…that consciousness is the tip of the mental iceberg, he was short of the mark by quite a bit-it may be more the size of a snowball on top of that iceberg. The mind operates most effici...

Ignorance is the mother not of devotion but of heresy.

The famous American psychotherapist M. Scott Peck was for many years an agnostic. He learned his psychiatry according to the standard model in which there was no such thing as evil. But at around the ...

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.

We will often stop at nothing to avoid cognitive dissonance. We will twist logic, bend reason, conveniently forget facts, invent new stories, even destroy relationships—all in the name of preserving o...

We must make up our minds to be ignorant of much, if we would know anything.

Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the...