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

I think beating myself up sometimes and knowing I am not happy when I do it makes me work harder to do a good job.

Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.

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.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

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.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

Sleep is the best meditation.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

No, I’m not anguished and tormented.

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.

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.

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

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.

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.

Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.

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

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

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

Life is grim, and we don’t have to be grim all the time.

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

Happiness is the cessation of suffering.

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to 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.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

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

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.

You might be tough, but you can only be so tough for so long, you know what I mean? The brain can only take so much damage. The body can only take so much damage.

When I feel I’m doing too much, I do less if I can.

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 guess there is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you get so sore at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.

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

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

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.

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

I get nervous for everything – literally everything.

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.

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

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.

If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

I’m going to stay active as long as I can politically, and with the Carter Center primarily, and if I’m able mentally and physically, will continue to be quite active.

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.

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

I don’t ever make moves under pressure.

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.

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

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

It’s very inexpensive to give a compliment.

Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we’ve always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us.

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.

You don’t always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that’s plenty.

Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.

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

There are going to be good days and bad days. Bottom line.