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.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

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.

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.

With increasing age, dullness of mind and heart sets in.

Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast – talk them or write them down.

My head’s never really quiet. The only time I can get it to turn off is if I watch ‚CSI‘ or ‚Law & Order,‘ where I have to follow the crime. If I can’t turn my head off during that, I know I’ve really got a problem.

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.

Hermits have no peer pressure.

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

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.

What a terrible thing to have lost one’s mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is.

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.

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.

I’m addicted to placebos.

I talk to myself all the time. Just make sure you answer.

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.

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

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.

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

Many of my fans often tell me that they listen to my songs to get through things. And therefore, obviously, I hope that they can picture being in a place where things are better… I hope my songs can bring people to a calm place.

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

Hatred is settled anger.

The deferring of anger is the best antidote to anger.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

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

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.

We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.

If we weren’t all crazy, we’d just go insane.

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.

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

The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

I guess I don’t so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.

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

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.

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

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

I don’t digest things with my mind.

I’m not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become.

I like to let things breathe.

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

I have a terrifying long list of fears. Literally everything – diseases, spiders… and people getting tired of me.

He was so depressed, he tried to commit suicide by inhaling next to an Armenian.

To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!

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 begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted.

But for my faith in God, I should have been a raving maniac.

When you begin to worry, go find something to do. Get busy being a blessing to someone; do something fruitful. Talking about your problem or sitting alone, thinking about it, does no good; it serves only to make you miserable. Above all else, remember that worrying is totally useless. Worrying will not solve your problem.

I can encourage my daughter to love her body, but what really matters are the observations she makes about my relationship with my own body.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

I didn’t like the way I looked in pictures – when I saw myself on a digital camera, I was like, ‚Eesh.‘

A great hallmark of mental wellness is the ability to be in the present moment, fully and with no thoughts of being elsewhere.

I’m crazy, but I’m not too crazy.

The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.

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

I don’t have many sad days.