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

I’m terrified of losing my voice.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

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.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

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

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.

Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.

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

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.

Meditation helps me to calm down.

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

I do suffer from depression, I suppose. Which isn’t that unusual. You know, a lot of people do.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

If you want what you’re saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody’s life. Your own, first.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way – everything is interdependent, not absolute. So that view is very helpful to maintain a peace of mind because the main destroyer of a peaceful mind is anger.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.

Jealousy… is a mental cancer.

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.

Nine men in ten are would be suicides.

I think women go crazy for a reason. It’s not like it just happens.

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.

Happiness is the cessation of suffering.

I get nervous for everything – literally everything.

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

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

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.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in 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.

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

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.

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

Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by ‚sophisticated‘ methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

There’s a long way to fall when you pretend that you’re so far away from the earth, far away from reality, floating in a bubble that’s protected by fame or success. It’s scary, and it’s the thing I fear the most: to be swallowed up by that bubble. It can be poison to you, fame.

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.

Since everything is in our heads, we had better not lose them.

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.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

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

Reality is a sliding door.

Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools.

Science never makes things that do not have to do with what we feel, by which I mean what we want and what we fear.

I’ve often said there’s nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.

We may define therapy as a search for value.

Everything I’ve been thinking, every vision, even down to every shot I throw, it just ends up here in reality. Whether it was in a fight and how to react or whether it was in a stadium with screaming fans or whether I was in a fancy car or the best clothes ever, I always put myself somewhere.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

There’s no reality except the one contained within us. That’s why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself.

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

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.

Encouragement to all women is – let us try to offer help before we have to offer therapy. That is to say, let’s see if we can’t prevent being ill by trying to offer a love of prevention before illness.

One good thing about acting in film is that it’s good therapy.

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

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.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

We want an Afghanistan that is shaped by the dreams of the great Afghan people, not by irrational fears and overreaching ambitions of others.