Sanity? Madness Put to Good Use

Anybody who has been listening to me for any period of time knows that I'm crazy about quotations.  And here are two more examples of why I'm crazy about quotations.

"What is Sanity?  Madness put to good use.  What is our waking life?  A dream controlled."  How well that sums up some of how I see the world.  What we call "sanity" is really insane--or "sanity is madness put to good use."

Some part of me has always felt that the life we all lead is crazy, meaningless, that nothing we do makes any sense.   Kill each other for principles?  Get out of bed in the morning?  Attend classes?  Go to work five days a week fifty weeks a year for fifty years in a row?  What is sanity?  Sanity is madness put to good uses.  And if we play with this quotation, very creative people are those who allow a little madness into this facade of sanity we all wear.  Nothing makes sense so why not act a little insanely at times.

And the second half of the quotation is beautiful too.  What is waking life?  A dream controlled.  Being awake is, often, dreamlike--or a dream controlled--or madness put to good use..  And the dreams we have often seem real, more real than parts of our waking life.   A good quote resonates in the mind--makes many people think of many things.  When you are awake you are in a dream which you control--to a certain extent--but wakefulness is often dreamlike, unreal.  Many have forwarded the theory that wakefulness is a dream--or that we are alive only when we are asleep--and when we die, we will be in the real world that we were in before we were born, the world of sleep.

Here is a second quotation that runs parallel with the preceding one.  "He that will not command his thoughts will soon lose command of his actions."  We all have terrible thoughts--fleeting thoughts we hope.  We all wish evil upon others at times.  Or, over a long life time, it is hard to control all one's thoughts.  One is not responsible for one's thoughts, but one can command the mind to think about other things--and if you can't command your mind, you are going crazy--insanity is the inability to control one's thoughts.  All the rest of us--those who are labeled sane, control their thoughts.  We may wish to kill someone, but we don't think about it all the time or we may end up doing it.

"He that will not command his thoughts will soon lose command of his actions."  And to remind you of the first quotation: "What is sanity?  Madness put to good use.  What is waking life?  A dream controlled.

 

Copyright © 2004   Henry Morgenstein

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