375 Mental health Quotes

Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where the people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free. True peace with oneself and with the world around us can only be achieved through the development of mental peace.

It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill- it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.

There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things.

Nothing is more capable of troubling our reason, and consuming our health, than secret notions of jealousy in solitude.

It's good to know that if I behave strangely enough, society will take full responsibility for me.

My first line of defense against reality is called sleep.

Did it ever strike you on such a morning as this that drowning would be happiness and peace?

I used to work in jobs I hated because I needed the money to buy a guitar. I know what it feels like to be depressed. On the other hand, I also know what it feels like to have money, to be successful, to be independent, but I can tell you that money and success never solve your problems.

If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.

If I couldn't laugh, I'd rather die.

Thoughts shut up want air, And spoil, like bales unopen'd to the sun.

The house of laughter makes a house of woe.

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

It is loneliness that makes the loudest noise. This is true of men as of dogs.

We have rudiments of reverence for the human body, but we consider as nothing the rape of the human mind.

I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don't know won't hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility.

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair.

Just think, right now as you read this, some guy somewhere is gettin' ready to hang himself.

Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.

I spent my childhood alone, overweight and ugly, angry at everything, and knowing nothing of a life beyond this sadness.

When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim's body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.

Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.

It's the boredom that kills you. You read until you're tired of that. You do crossword puzzles until you're tired of that. This is torture. This is mental torture.

There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.

If it's dangerous to talk to yourself, it's probably even dicier to listen.

The psychic scars caused by believing that you are ugly leave a permanent mark on your personality.

Melancholy Is not, as you conceive, indisposition Of body, but the mind's disease.

No small misery is caused by overworked and unhappy people, in the dark views which they necessarily take up themselves, and force upon others, of work itself.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

Misery is almost always the result of thinking.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough - that we should try again.

I do think I go out of my way to be a very normal person and I just find it frustrating that people think that I'm some kind of weirdo reclusive that never comes out into the world. Y'know, I'm a very strong person and I think that's why actually I find it really infuriating when I read, 'She had a nervous breakdown' or 'She's not very mentally stable, just a weak, frail little creature'.

I am so often accused of gloominess and melancholy. And I think I'm probably the most cheerful man around. I don't consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin. ... I think those descriptions of me are quite inappropriate to the gravity of the predicament that faces us all. I've always been free from hope. It's never been one of my great solaces. I feel that more and more we're invited to make ourselves strong and cheerful. .... I think that it was Ben Jonson who said, I have studied all the theologies and all the philosophies, but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.

'...in the West, the insane are so many that they are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them . . . .' (p. 3)

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.

To abandon oneself to despair without a struggle, to commit suicide as a relief, is like leaving the field of battle before we have vanquished the enemy.

I have always believed that exercise is the key not only to physical health but to peace of mind.

Buck up and be jolly, my dear lady! Stillbirth is a sign that God has a sense of humour!

Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.

A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our one duty is to furnish it well.

One long-past innocent day, in my prefolly youth, I came upon a statement in an undistinguished textbook on psychiatry that, as when Kant read Hume, woke me forever from my garden-of-eden slumber. 'The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis.'

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.

Mental illness is not funny.

No man is happy who does not think himself so.

When a third wave of poverty overwhelmed me, I knew with even greater certitude than when I lived in Clerkenwell that the only complete solution to my problems was suicide. I never brought it off. I was afraid... Hopelessness was thinly spread like a drizzle over my whole outlook. But, in an emergency, I could not find a puddle of despondency deep enough to drown in.

I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east.

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

'We should not allow ourselves, individually or our ethnic communities to become easy tools for politics of race that will continue to segregate us mentally and emotionally.'

To me, life is tough enough without having someone kick you from the inside.

When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it.

Anxiety is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. It results from over motivation - leading to errors that lead to an underestimation of one's self. Work out your anxieties on paper and read. This calms the mind.

Most of the appearance of mirth in the world is not mirth, it is art. The wounded spirit is not seen, but walks under a disguise.

I am forced, as I have often said, to try to make myself laugh, that I may not cry: for one or other I must do.

Captain Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading.

That's what a shrink is for, my friends and neighbors; their job is to fuck the mentally disturbed and make them pregnant with sanity. It's a bull's job and they go to school to learn how, and their courses are all variations on a theme: Slipping It to the Psychos for Fun and Profit, Mostly Profit. And if you find yourself someday lying on that great analyst's couch where so many have lain before you, I'd ask you to remember one thing: When you get sanity by stud, the child always looks like the father. And they have a very high suicide rate.

I've taken off two months, three months, at a time, and, by the end, I get really squirrelly. My night life, my dream life, gets extremely populated and crazed.

Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

It was cold and clammy in the stone cell; they called it the 'cooler,' and used it to reduce the temperature of the violent and intractable. It was a trouble-saving device; they just left the man there and forgot him, and his own tormented mind did the rest.

Following daily such a dread- ful trade to earn a living, With every second on that cliff So cruel and unforgiving,

I don't understand anything, so there you go : you know what my problem is? I watch too much news, man. That's my problem, that's why I'm so depressed all the time. I figured it out. I watch too much CNN, man. I don't know if you've ever sat around and watched CNN more than, I don't know, 20 hours in one day : I don't recommend that. Watch CNN Headline News for 1 hour, it's the most depressing thing you'll ever fucking do. 'WAR, FAMINE, DEATH, AIDS, HOMELESS, RECESSION, DEPRESSION. WAR, FAMINE, DEATH, AIDS, HOMELESS :' Then, you look out your window : [makes cricket noises] Where's all this shit happening? Ted Turner's making this shit up! Jane Fonda won't sleep with him, he runs to a typewriter: ''By 1992, we will all die of AIDS.' Read that on the air. I don't get laid, no one gets laid!' I'm writing Jane Fonda: 'Will you fuck this guy so we can get some good news, please?' I want to see a well-laid Ted Turner newscast: 'Hey, it's all going to work out. Here's sports.'

'A rolling stone gathers no moss.' Try as I might I could not remember the meaning. At last I hazarded, 'Well, it means a person who's always active and never pauses to reflect - ' No, that didn't sound right. I tried again. 'That means a man who is always active and keeps growing in mental and moral stature won't grow stale.' He was looking at me more intently, so I added by way of clarification, 'I mean, a man who's active and doesn't let grass grow under his feet, he'll get ahead in life.' Doctor Nisea said, 'I see.' And I knew that I had revealed, for the purposes of legal diagnosis, a schizophrenic thinking disorder. 'What does it mean?' I asked. 'Did I get it backward?' 'Yes, I'm afraid so. The generally-accepted meaning of the proverb is the opposite of what you've given; it is generally taken to mean that a person who - ' 'You don't have to tell me,' I broke in. 'I remember - I really knew it. A person who's unstable will never acquire anything of value.'

And when they told her she's delirious

I have an essay with the title 'Eyes in their Last Extremity'. The title comes from the suicide note of the short-story writer Akutagawa Ryunosuke... It is the phrase that pulls at me with the greatest strength. Akutagawa said that he seemed to be gradually losing the animal something known as the strength to live, and continued: 'I am living in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice... I do not know when I will summon up the resolve to kill myself. But nature is for me more beautiful than it has ever been before. I have no doubt that you will laugh at the contradiction, for here I love nature even when I am contemplating suicide. But nature is beautiful because it comes to my eyes in their last extremity.' Akutagawa committed suicide in 1927, at the age of thirty-five. In my essay, 'Eyes in their Last Extremity', I had to say: 'How ever alienated one may be from the world, suicide is not a form of enlightenment. However admirable he may be, the man who commits suicide is far from the realm of the saint.' I neither admire nor am in sympathy with suicide.

'Among those who give thoughts to things, is there one who does not think of suicide?' With me was the knowledge that that fellow Ikkyu twice contemplated suicide. I have 'that fellow', because the priest Ikkyu is known even to children as a most amusing person, and because anecdotes about his limitlessly eccentric behavior have come down to us in ample numbers. It is said of him that children climbed his knee to stroke his beard, that wild birds took feed from his hand. It would seem from all this that he was the ultimate in mindlessness, that he was an approachable and gentle sort of priest. As a matter of fact he was the most severe and profound of Zen priests. Said to have been the son of an emperor, he entered a temple at the age of six, and early showed his genius as a poetic prodigy. At the same time he was troubled with the deepest of doubts about religion and life. 'If there is a god, let him help me. If there is none, let me throw myself to the bottom of the lake and become food for fishes.' Leaving behind these words he sought to throw himself into a lake, but was held back. ... He gave his collected poetry the title 'Collection of the Roiling Clouds', and himself used the expression 'Roiling Clouds' as a pen name. In his collection and its successor are poems quite without parallel in the Chinese and especially the Zen poetry of the Japanese middle ages, erotic poems and poems about the secrets of the bedchamber that leave one in utter astonishment. He sought, by eating fish and drinking spirits and having commerce with women, to go beyond the rules and proscriptions of the Zen of his day, and to seek liberation from them, and thus, turning against established religious forms, he sought in the pursuit of Zen the revival and affirmation of the essence of life, of human existence, in a day civil war and moral collapse.