James Boswell Quotes

I don't think any human being/artist is 100% emotionally stable, based on the human condition and our emotions that relate to it.

I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

There is no insanity so devastating in man's life as utter sanity.

Is not man himself the most unsettled of all the creatures of the earth? What is this trembling sensation that is intensified with each ascending step in the natural order?

He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.

Those things interest me a lot in songwriting - the human nature of how people think, and the muck that we wind up in.

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

Man has always been his own most vexing problem.

Her sanity was a fragile thing, a butterfly cupped in her hands, that she carried with her everywhere, afraid of what would happen if she let it go-or got careless and crushed it.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. A person would have to be an expert tightrope walker in order not to fall.

Who but the mad would choose to keep on living? In the end, aren't we all just a little crazy?

Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;--when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

We as beings are very contradictory, complicated creatures that work in our best interest and against our best interest. In a certain way, I want my work to have all that messiness.

The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man.

Sanity is a compromise.

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.

Fairy tales begin with conflict because we all begin our lives with conflict. We are all misfit for the world, and somehow we must fit in, fit in with other people, and thus we must invent or find the means through communication to satisfy as well as resolve conflicting desires and instincts.

The madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up.

Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little - oh, I admit only a very little - of what life is about.

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out," said the shopkeeper. "That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.