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.

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?‘

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

What keeps me up at night? Anxiety. Anxiety, the inability to go to sleep, it’s quite literally that.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.

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

Take me, I am the drug; take me, I am hallucinogenic.

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

Jiu Jitsu is a great workout both mentally and physically. You want to be strong for it and flexible for it.

Love is a serious mental disease.

The dieting wars have got to stop.

I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse. So for me, it’s a great thing to be able to scream and say whatever I want.

My mother never made me do anything for my brothers, like serve them. I think that’s an important lesson, especially for the Latino culture, because the women are expected to be the ones that serve and cook and whatever. Not in our family. Everybody was equal.

I can’t stress to you enough how much I can relate to teens being cyberbullied. Something that helps me is looking at old videos of me and my friends from middle school, or videos of my family. I love watching funny videos of my favorite people – it really cheers me up.

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

Sometimes, women in families put themselves last until it manifests itself in their own health.

The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.

I don’t like being alone.

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

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

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

Physical comforts cannot subdue mental suffering, and if we look closely, we can see that those who have many possessions are not necessarily happy. In fact, being wealthy often brings even more anxiety.

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.

As a shame researcher, I know that the very best thing to do in the midst of a shame attack is totally counterintuitive: Practice courage and reach out!

Games lubricate the body and the mind.

Don’t just let the devil use your mind as a garbage dump.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

With the amount of money I have, it’s difficult raising children the way I was raised.

It’s very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can’t imagine.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable.

‚Fame‘ exhausts me.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper; so cry away.

I think every entertainer’s had nights when things go wrong. I mean you can’t remember everything all the time, and especially if you’re having hard times personally, things going on that you – you know, and then people make it worse. And that makes you feel worse.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

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

The truth is that there is no actual stress or anxiety in the world; it’s your thoughts that create these false beliefs. You can’t package stress, touch it, or see it. There are only people engaged in stressful thinking.

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.

The roots of the problems we face in the world, in our national life, and in our family and personal lives are spiritual.

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.

I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it’s the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It’s probably the most important thing in a person.

I must confess that I lead a miserable life. For almost two years, I have ceased to attend any social functions, just because I find it impossible to say to people, ‚I am deaf.‘ If I had any other profession, I might be able to cope with my infirmity; but in my profession, it is a terrible handicap.

It’s much worse to read criticism about your son than yourself.

Even the securest financial plan and the finest health coverage aren’t enough to hold us steady when the challenges come… We need something more, something deeper and unshakeable, something that will see us through life’s hard times.

Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there’s nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.

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

People change because of kids. They change how they eat. They change the way they think. They change the way they see one another.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

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.

Cycling can be lonely, but in a good way. It gives you a moment to breathe and think, and get away from what you’re working on.

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.

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

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

Mind over mattress.

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

I don’t think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib.

I found that with depression, one of the most important things you could realise is that you’re not alone.

Your children will see what you’re all about by what you live rather than what you say.