“Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)
Context: Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes135

Poet, essayist, physician 1809–1894

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 2, p. 97

“Sometimes the person who is the most logical is the person whom we call insane.”

Kevin Spacey (1959) American actor, director and producer

On the character "Prot", in the movie K-PAX; Premiere magazine (September 2001)

“To save one life, Mr. Tagomi had to take two. The logical, balanced mind cannot make sense of that. A kindly man like Mr. Tagomi could be driven insane by the implications of such reality.”

Philip K. Dick book The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle (1962)

“Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

“"One sees, from this Essay, that the theory of probabilities is basically just common sense reduced to calculus; it makes one appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct, often without being able to account for it."”

Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) French mathematician and astronomer

"On voit, par cet Essai, que la théorie des probabilités n'est, au fond, que le bon sens réduit au calcul; elle fait apprécier avec exactitude ce que les esprits justes sentent par une sorte d'instinct, sans qu'ils puissent souvent s'en rendre compte." <br class="br">From the Introduction to Théorie Analytique des Probabilités http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/Visualiseur?Destination=Gallica&O=NUMM-88764, second and later editions; also published separately as Essai philosophique sur les Probabilités (1814). Œuvres complètes de Laplace, tome VII, p. cliii, Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1878-1912. <br class="br">Also reported as: "The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus; it enables us to appreciate with exactness that which accurate minds feel with a sort of instinct for which ofttimes they are unable to account." <br class="br">Or as: "Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation."