Norman O. Brown Quotes

Reality is always controlled by the people who are the most insane.

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

It's true we're all a little insane.

The problem with being nuts, she thought, is that you don't always feel as if you're nuts. Sometimes, in fact, you feel perfectly sane, and there just happens to be a trailer-shaped dragon crouching in the lot next door.

We live in condensations of our imagination

Insanity is a very high art form. If everyone was insane, I wouldn't be here!

Perception is reality. People take what they want to from things.

Reason is the illusion of reality

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

Against a diseased imagination demonstration goes for nothing.

More important than innate disposition, objective experience, and environment is the subjective evaluation of these. Furthermore, this evaluation stands in a certain, often strange, relation to reality.

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality.

There is always a divergence between our perception and what actually exists.

Reality is what we want it to be or what we do not want it to be, but it is not our wanting or our not wanting that makes it so.

Consensus reality seemed like a dull, dead-end street compared to the intense, mutable reality of visions or whatever they were - neurological misfires. I expected life to be full of sudden, inexplicable surprises. When these things didn't happen for a while, life seemed dull and painful.

Insanity is believing your hallucinations are real. Religion is believing that other peoples' hallucinations are real.

The mad rarely know that they are mad. It's the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them.

All descriptions of reality are limited expressions of the world of emptiness. Yet we attach to the descriptions and think they are reality. That is a mistake.

Far more unwaveringly, the neurotic keeps before his eye his God, his idol, his ideal of personality and clings to his guiding principle, losing sight in the meanwhile of reality, whereas the normal person is always ready to dispense with this crutch, this aid, and reckon unhampered with reality.

Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.

No doubt the world is entirely an imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.

After all, across the population there are slight differences in brain function, and sometimes these translate directly into different ways of experiencing the world. And each individual believes his way is reality.

Eccentricty had flowered into madness.

It is the bane and the balm of individual perception that 'objective' reality is seen through the filter of each person's temperament.