Sane New World Quotes

“It’s as though as a species we have no brakes, only breakdowns.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“One evening, a Native American elder told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, ‘My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride and superiority. The other is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth and compassion.’ The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, ‘Which wolf wins?’ The elder simply replied, ‘The one that you feed.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“The ultimate freedom lies in knowing everything, including you, is in a state of flux; you’re never still, you’re always ‘nexting’;”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“We never see the world as it really is but only how we see it. And because we’re trapped in our own interpretation, we are prepared to go to war with other people caught in their view of reality – and never the twain shall meet.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“It’s amazing how we will suffer pain and abuse to keep our lives predictable. We’ll let our inner voices brutalize us, rather than live with the possibility that we might be wrong about how we see things. We’ll think, ‘Well at least it’s a pain that’s familiar’. Uncertainty”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“On the toilet no one is a star. Remember that and you will go far in life.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: Taming The Mind

“These days, I feel that what kills the spark of curiosity is the fact that everything hangs on a grade. Nothing will burn out an interest quicker. I’m aware high grades get you into a great university where you will go to the best parties, but if you get hooked on this chasing the grade thing and (even worse) if your parents push you too hard, you might find that you get the habit of chasing a rabbit for the rest of your life, thinking that there will be some reward in front of you, always just out of reach.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“Out on the Savannah, our physiological responses were perfectly suited to deal with stressors (run from the big animals with big teeth). These days we can’t just run from what drives up our anxiety and stress; mortgages, money problems, looking hot, relationships and deadlines. Evolution did not set us up to suffer Jurassic Park levels of stress, day in day out; that’s the bitch of living at today’s pace. Psychological”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“Our brain has been shaped by evolutionary pressure over time to provide our bodies with ever more efficient ways of surviving and reproducing. It is designed to process all information for the purpose of living on, it doesn’t care about happiness – it has things to do, places to go.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“We are our own walking pharmacies shooting ourselves up with our own homemade chemicals. This constant need for a fix to make you feel good prompts you to pursue rewards over and over again and strengthens the behaviour that made you want to get them in the first place. It’s a vicious circle. So”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“The most cognitively brilliant people usually have had to sacrifice their emotional selves.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“And as we get older, our lenses get more and more narrow and blurrier until we only see our own tiny pin-point view; this limited vision eventually makes bigots of us all. This is why so many marriages fall apart. You meet someone, think that you know them, marry them and then ten years later you divorce them because they turned out not to be who you thought they were. They never were.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“The point is, we’re all changing all the time. You once found it hard to tie a shoelace and now you don’t even have to look. The change is so subtle; you think that whatever you feel like right now is how you always felt. Our brain can trick us into thinking life stands still. In the end this causes the human race the most heartache. Blinkered”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“I’ve learnt that if you let out your anger on someone, it comes back to you like acid reflux and you’ve poisoned yourself and feel toxic and nauseated while the taxi driver probably just goes back to his home and wife and has a lovely life. I”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“In my opinion, our downfall began when we started to think of ourselves as ‘individuals’.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“Now we determine each other’s worth by asking, ‘What do you do?’ If you say ‘nothing’, people move away from you as if you’re a corpse.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“We hold those who are on the tightest of schedules in reverence; the busier you are, the higher your status as a human being. For those of us who suffer from this phenomenon, we have sped up to such a frenzy of things “to do,” we make ourselves ill just to avoid having to look inside and see that we might not have any point at all. So who is ultimately the winner? The busy, running people? Or maybe it’s someone who sits on a rock and fishes all day or someone who has the time to feel the breeze on his face? Who is the real winner? (Please dear God, I hope it’s not the guy with the fish.)”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: A User's Guide to the Normal-Crazy Mind

“Now nothing is anything, and everything is nothingness, just the cannons of pressure going off in my head. It’s as if your old personality has been sucked out so slowly that you didn’t notice its departure. Very slowly it’s been stolen away and each day you remember less and less of who you are and what you feel.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“we’re living longer, getting taller, and are a push of a finger away from every other person on the planet and yet we do not know how to run ourselves. Maybe we’re not supposed to know and when we’re finished filling the world with parking lots, muffin shops and Starbucks, our point on Earth is finished and with one big cataclysmic boom we’ll be gone.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“our hearts bleed because we hear of a beached whale while the next minute we’re baying for the blood of someone who stole the last shopping trolley.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“With mindfulness the rumour is wrong that the point is to empty your mind; you need your mind to analyze, memorize, create and most importantly exist. It can never be empty while you’re alive, even in a coma your mind is still chattering away. The trick is to learn to live with the unrelenting sound track. It isn’t easy. Mindfulness is like training in a mental boot camp, it is not for the fainthearted because the mind is like a wild animal demanding you obey its every whim. And you’ve become so used to being the slave, you obey, ‘Gotta do this, gotta write email, gotta garden, gotta learn judo, gotta row across the Atlantic.’ The ‘gottas’ never stop and we always do as we are told. It’s so much easier to go along with what you’re used to; certainty is less threatening than uncertainty even if you suffer because of it.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“As soon as you even think about stress, a whole cascade of reactions happen: your thalamus (the relay station of your brain) sends out a wake-up call to your brain stem, signals are sent to all your major organs and muscle groups getting them ready for fight or flight and your adrenal glands release the stress hormones; cortisol suppresses the immune system to reduce inflammation from any injuries and stimulates the amygdala to keep you vigilant, which produces even more cortisol. It also suppresses activity in the hippocampus reducing your memory so you only think about what you did last time you had a similar emergency.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“Unfortunately our old reptilian brain didn’t get absorbed, it’s still in there squashed with the newer models, like a relative you can’t get rid of. This ancient brain, developed about 400 million years ago, is called the brain stem; it is the ‘duh’ part of the brain. It prompts us to mate, kill and eat, which is perfect if you’re living in a field or working at Goldman Sachs.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“Our culture promotes an endless need for fulfillment to always want what the next guy has, even though the effort might kill us.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“The brain detects negative information faster than it does positive. We are drawn to bad news. When something is flagged as a negative experience, the hippocampus (responsible for consolidating memory) makes sure it’s stored in an easy–to-reach place for future reference. If you whistled a happy tune and just thought lovely thoughts you’d probably be hit by a truck pretty quickly, and find yourself as road kill. This negative bias primes you for avoidance and fear but when you direct it at yourself, it can bring you to your knees with depression.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“Half of the cure is realizing that you are not alone, that this ‘illness’ actually exists like any other physical illness; you are not making it up and you are not some self-indulgent, self-obsessed narcissist who’s looking for pity or an excuse not to show up at work or school. Find someone who shares your pain. Go and”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“By 2030, the World Health Organization predicts more people will be affected by depression than any other health problem. It already affects more people than all physical illnesses put together.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“The feeling is that of being a corpse, no sense of skin or other extremities, like fingers or legs. I’m this empty thing now and honestly have no recollection of the chutzpah I had only last week. Now nothing is anything, and everything is nothingness, just the cannons of pressure going off in my head. It’s as if your old personality has been sucked out so slowly that you didn’t notice its departure. Very slowly it’s been stolen away and each day you remember less and less of who you are and what you feel.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“I know people who watch CNN all day, particularly when working out on the StairMaster, buffing their butts while those headlines of disaster slap them in the face with an up-to-the-minute report on another high school shooting. You can see a lip-lubed anchor woman running over to an injured cheerleader, shoving the microphone in her face demanding, ‘How do you feel about the incident?’ giving her a little kick as she sinks into unconsciousness. ‘How do you feel?’ She has the look of a cat before it kills a mouse as she turns to the camera and says, ‘Well, Jerry, that’s all on the up-to-the-minute report on the tragedy happening down here, back to you.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller

“I never get it when I see people waving their national flag, getting all weepy, singing some dirge about their homeland. Everyone sobbing for the old country (which is just a wet piece of peat moss) going on and on about how many generations back their people lived on this potato farm (said with an Irish accent) and how they loved it even though they’ve probably emigrated to another country. To me it’s dirt, to them it’s land: same thing. My people this, my people that. I have no real people except when I was in the mental institution and then it was full of them. They were my people, because they did not answer with ‘fine’ when you asked how they were. We didn’t need a flag.”
― Ruby Wax, Sane New World: The original bestseller