Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

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

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

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!

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.

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

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

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.

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

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.

If I couldn’t laugh I just would go insane, If we couldn’t laugh we just would go insane, If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane.

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.

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

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It’s a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we’re telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

Whenever I make music, it reflects where I’m at mentally.

Fear is a spirit that produces a feeling.

I am in my own head most of the time.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

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

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

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.

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.

Learning about climate change triggered my depression in the first place. But it was also what got me out of my depression, because there were things I could do to improve the situation. I don’t have time to be depressed anymore.

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.

If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you’ll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.

As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.

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.

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

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

I do think coaches need to get away from the game more, though. It’s good for them.

Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!

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.

Ritual is another word for fear, manifested in a different way.

Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‚yours,‘ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you.

I don’t think about the end game. I’ve got lots to occupy my mind. It’s the rage that keeps me going.

Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.

I try not to think about my life. I have no life. I need therapy.

The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha.

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

People who say they don’t care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don’t care what people think.

Chefs are nutters. They’re all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.

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.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

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.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is that the sane have the power to lock up the insane.

If I feel anxious every time someone is staring at me, well, I can’t control what they stare at, but my reaction is, I’m just not going to go outside the house. I’m going to stay in and chill. And when I do go out, I understand what comes along with that.

As a lifestyle you always being the focal point is innately unhealthy.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

Throw off your worries when you throw off your clothes at night.

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

I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

Hatred is active, and envy passive dislike; there is but one step from envy to hate.

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

The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

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.

Drunkenness is temporary suicide.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

There is only one way… to get anybody to do anything. And that is by making the other person want to do it.

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.