A Quote by R. D. Laing

From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is not "true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves.

R. D. Laing

Quote Topics

Alienated Destruction Everything Madness Our Patients Point Pseudo Sanity Starting Starting Point Them Themselves True Us

Quote Author

R. D. Laing
Scottish - Psychologist
October 7, 1927 - August 23, 1989

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

R. D. Laing

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

George Bernard Shaw

There is a madness, yes, this is true. Few mortals possess it, the willingness to step away from the protection of sanity. To walk into the wild wood of madness...

Neil Gaiman

... he preferred his own madness, to the regular sanity. He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free. He did not want that old sanity of the world, which was become so repulsive. He rejoiced in the new-found world of his madness. It was so fresh and delicate and so satisfying.

D. H. Lawrence

In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too

Saul Bellow

Because we are limited in our knowledge, even the sanest of us are slightly insane. Our limitations are a kind of madness, and we can only choose to deny we are mad, and so descend into a dark spiral of total insanity, or accept we are mad and embark on a quest to regain our true and wholesome sanity

Dwight Longenecker

That in you which recognizes madness as madness (even if it is your own) is sanity, is the arising awareness, is the end of insanity.

Eckhart Tolle

Madness is the first step towards unselfishness. Be mad and tell us what is behind the veil of "sanity". The purpose of life is to bring us closer to those secrets, and madness is the only means.

Khalil Gibran

Silence must be comprehended as not solely the absence of sound. It is the natural environment for serenity and contemplation. Life without silence is life without privacy. The difference between sanity and madness is the quality of our thoughts. Silence is on the side of sanity.

Norman Cousins

One might talk about the sanity of the atom the sanity of space the sanity of the electron the sanity of water- For it is all alive and has something comparable to that which we call sanity in ourselves. The only oneness is the oneness of sanity.

D. H. Lawrence

We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness.