I suffer from deep depression, so my only release is music.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

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

To live is to think.

Worrying is like paying on a debt that may never come due.

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

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

I was ready to quit music. It felt to me like music equalled death.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I’m not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

I believe we live in a love-starved society. Everywhere you go there are probably people who haven’t had the right kind of love in their lives.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.

Total relaxation is the secret to enjoying sitting meditation. I sit with my spine upright, but not rigid; and I relax all the muscles in my body.

I just think it’s so important not to take yourself too seriously.

You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

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

I think a certain amount of stress in life is good. The stress of just working, which takes effort – I think it keeps you going.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

Well, all comedy starts with anger. You get angry, and its never for a good reason, right? You know its not a good reason. And then you try and work it from there.

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.

If it’s stress of things that we cannot control, what you have to do is you mitigate that stress as much as possible. You’ve planned, you’ve trained, you’ve done everything you can in your power to mitigate the stress that’s facing you. And then after that, there’s nothing you can do. So, you have to let that one go.

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’ve tried everything. I’ve done therapy, I’ve done colonics. I went to a psychic who had me running around town buying pieces of ribbon to fill the colors in my aura. Did the Prozac thing.

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.

A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance.

Nine men in ten are would be suicides.

I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.

Ain’t nothing like a good cry.

Catering to bad feelings feeds and empowers them.

Silence speaks so much louder than screaming tantrums. Never give anyone an excuse to say that you’re crazy.

My body is weird. I wake up when the sun comes up, and it’s hard for me to go to sleep. My thoughts just take over.

It’s hard knowing who to trust with your personal life. When you cry in your room at night, you don’t always know who to call. So I am very close to my family.

We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal.

I’ve suffered through depression and anxiety my entire life.

If someone decides they’re not going to be happy, it’s not your problem. You don’t have to spend your time and energy trying to cheer up someone who has already decided to stay in a bad mood. Believe it or not, you can actually hurt people by playing into their self-pity.

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

Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.

I’m perpetually lonely.

When I was into my 30s, I became increasingly depressed by rejection letters. I had had the feeling that by the time I was 30, I would be established. But I was not at all. By the time of ‚Lives of Girls and Women,‘ I was into my 40s and I had become more thin-skinned.

The healthy man does not torture others – generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

I am alone; I am always alone no matter what.

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.

The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It’s a death trap.

When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

As we dread any disease that undermines the health of the body, so should we deplore contention, which is a corroding canker of the spirit.

Since I was 16, I’ve felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression.

There is no such thing as paranoia. Your worst fears can come true at any moment.

The best cure for the body is a quiet mind.

I say there’re no depressed words just depressed minds.

Do not give in too much to feelings. A overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

It would be my guess that Madonna is not a very happy woman. From my own experience, having gone through persona changes like that, that kind of clawing need to be the center of attention is not a pleasant place to be.

If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.