I get nervous for everything – literally everything.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

It seems like we wake up and it’s a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, ‚What the hell am I doing?‘

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

‚Worry‘ is a word that I don’t allow myself to use.

It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don’t suppose anybody really understands yet.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

Love is a serious mental disease.

I’m the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him.

I have a slight bit of OCD, I think. I’m not walking around flipping light switches. But when I say I’m going to do something, I have to do it.

For me, there have been times when an action movie, even a ‚Tomb Raider,‘ has helped me get out of myself and be physical again. It’s like therapy.

It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of somebody being nervous when I’m talking to them.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

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.

My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It’s just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she’s the daughter of alcoholics who’d leave her alone at Christmas time.

I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary.

Worry – a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance – the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.

Women in particular need to keep an eye on their physical and mental health, because if we’re scurrying to and from appointments and errands, we don’t have a lot of time to take care of ourselves. We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‚to do‘ list.

Whenever the speech is corrupted so is the mind.

When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.

If a leader doesn’t convey passion and intensity then there will be no passion and intensity within the organization and they’ll start to fall down and get depressed.

Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.

What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.

Be a force of love as often as you can and turn away negative thoughts whenever you feel them surface.

Well, there are some things that I just can’t get out of my head, and they start to annoy me after a while. Sometimes they’re of my own creation, as well – and they’re just as annoying. It’s not only other people’s ear worms that bug me, it’s my own, as well.

Depression runs in my family on both sides, and I have to be wary.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

I don’t carry the burden of the past or the madness of the future. I live in the present.

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.

A man who suffers before it is necessary, suffers more than is necessary.

We have an obligation to help people that cannot help themselves. The mentally retarded, the physically retarded, et cetera.

I’m always worried about everything. Like spiders.

Anger is like a storm rising up from the bottom of your consciousness. When you feel it coming, turn your focus to your breath.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

You might be tough, but you can only be so tough for so long, you know what I mean? The brain can only take so much damage. The body can only take so much damage.

Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration.

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.

You aren’t normal if you sing to people. You aren’t a normal person. It’s nerve-racking.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

Why should I stop working? If I do, I’ll die and it’ll all be finished.

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.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

I have a little bit of PTSD when I hear a big bang or a loud noise or keys – I jump out of my skin.

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.

I’m a super-duper over-analyzer. You mix that with self-doubt and pressure, and that’s never healthy.

I wonder how many decisions we make every day. I believe it’s probably hundreds. We decide whether or not to get out of bed, what we’ll eat, what we’ll do, what we’ll think about, what we’ll say… and on and on.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

I’m not a complete psychopath. Am I partially? Sure. I’ll accept that. But I’m not a complete psychopath.

I was called really horrible, profane names very loudly in front of huge crowds of people, and my schoolwork suffered at one point.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

When you get angry, your options narrow.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.