I believe that everyone experiences depression to some degree at some time in their lives. And there are probably millions of people who live with a low level of sadness and heaviness day in and day out.

It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.

I know from personal experience how damaging it can be to live with bitterness and unforgiveness. I like to say it’s like taking poison and hoping your enemy will die. And it really is that harmful to us to live this way.

People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

I wanted to write when I was young, but people said it was impossible. Then my parents locked me in a mental institution – they said I was crazy and would never make a living from writing.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

I go through a lot of depression, and I know other people do, too, but I have an outlet that so many people don’t. If you have that inside of you and can’t get it out, what do you do?

The greatest remedy for anger is delay.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

I have the habit of attention to such excess, that my senses get no rest – but suffer from a constant strain.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s.

When you get into your car, shut the door and be there for just half a minute. Breathe, feel the energy inside your body, look around at the sky, the trees. The mind might tell you, ‚I don’t have time.‘ But that’s the mind talking to you. Even the busiest person has time for 30 seconds of space.

We may define therapy as a search for value.

When I was 11 I became very depressed. It had a lot to do with the climate and ecological crisis. I thought everything was just so wrong and nothing was happening and there’s no point in anything.

Getting stress out of your life takes more than prayer alone. You must take action to make changes and stop doing whatever is causing the stress. You can learn to calm down in the way you handle things.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.

I had slumps that lasted into the winter.

Dread, which is closely related to fear, steals the ability to enjoy ordinary life and makes people anxious about the future. It keeps them from looking forward to the next day, the next month, or the next decade.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

I can get where some scientists would say comedians are crazy. What you have to understand: A lot of comedians are dealing with a dark passion. A lot of these are guys coming from a tumultuous life, including myself. Some people need outlets, a way to express yourself.

When the negative thoughts come – and they will; they come to all of us – it’s not enough to just not dwell on it… You’ve got to replace it with a positive thought.

Meditation can help us embrace our worries, our fear, our anger; and that is very healing. We let our own natural capacity of healing do the work.

A lot of times, people feel that if they forgive the person who hurt them, then they will continue to take advantage of them or not take responsibility for what they did wrong.

Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement.

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.

I’m tender on the inside.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

I think the most important thing is to keep active and to hope that your mind stays active.

If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.

Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.

Exercise is really important to me – it’s therapeutic. So if I’m ever feeling tense or stressed or like I’m about to have a meltdown, I’ll put on my iPod and head to the gym or out on a bike ride along Lake Michigan with the girls.

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

When I first went to places where people were suffering from war and persecution, I felt ashamed of my feelings of sadness. I could see more possibilities in my life.

One good thing about acting in film is that it’s good therapy.

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

I felt like I had a really bad case of writer’s block… Music is so therapeutic for me that if I can’t get it out, I start feeling bad about myself – a lot of self-loathing.

You get to a point where it’s like you can’t really do anything right, and people will pick on you for whatever decisions you make, so I just try and take no notice and get on with my music.

The dieting wars have got to stop.

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

You don’t always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that’s plenty.

A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.

I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

Most men are within a finger’s breadth of being mad.

Games lubricate the body and the mind.

There’s a scripture that says, ‚A merry heart doeth good like medicine.‘ I think that’s true, too.