Sanity And Depression Quotes

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Melancholy suicide. —This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract;
Émile Durkheim (Suicide: A Study in Sociology)
I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again.
Nicole Lyons (Hush)
Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own.
Alyssa Reyans (Letters from a Bipolar Mother (Chronicles of A Fractured Life))
Compared to bipolar's magic, reality seems a raw deal. It's not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it's the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity - the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don't understand, we say. They just don't get it. They'll never be artists.
David Lovelace (Scattershot: My Bipolar Family)
To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
That's an incredibly depressing thought," I said "that if you're in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity it is human nature to veer towards the madness end.
Jon Ronson (The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry)
I began to get a feeling familiar to me from my bartending days of being the only sane man in a nuthouse. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.
William S. Burroughs (And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks)
But how sane can the mind really be if it doesn't even know its own depth?
A.R.H
So instead of seeing your depression and anxiety as a form of madness, I would tell my younger self—you need to see the sanity in this sadness. You need to see that it makes sense. Of course it is excruciating. I will always dread that pain returning, every day of my life. But that doesn’t mean the pain is insane, or irrational. If you touch your hand to a burning stove, that, too, will be agony, and you will snatch your hand away as quickly as possible. That’s a sane response. If you kept your hand on the stove, it would burn and burn until it was destroyed.
Johann Hari (Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions)
You are not walking slow enough, when taking a walk, if you do not come across as bored or depressed (to the average sane person).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In this fallen world, sadness is an act of sanity, our tears the testimony of the sane.
Zack Eswine (Spurgeon's Sorrows: Realistic Hope for those who Suffer from Depression)
Yes. To write a novel is to risk my sanity. The deeper I get into the suffering and conflict of the characters, into the very situations and thoughts and feelings that make the novel worthwhile, the worse I feel, and the more likely I am to be severely depressed when the book is finished. There is no avoiding this: it is the result of attempting to tell all you know, to reach for the stars, to write what matters.
Anne Rice
Slowly but surely, I let the happiness back into my life. There were times when I psyched myself out and let happiness play peek-a-boo as I let despair, pain, hurt, stress and depression back into my life. When I had to start from ground zero, I didn’t think I was going to make it. I was a fallen warrior who didn’t have any armor for protection. All of my weapons of bravery, peace, sanity, and joy were stolen from me. I was abandoned without any protection from the world
Charlena E. Jackson (A Woman's Love Is Never Good Enough)
It was depressing that he found it so much easier to question his sanity than my reality.
Matt Haig (How to Stop Time)
They say there’s so much beauty in the world, but I don’t see it. Perhaps that’s my problem. Am I crazy for having major depressive disorder, or is the rest of the population crazy for not having it? How do you even define sanity? Is it the will to live another day in spite of a lifetime of failures? Or is it the desire to keep going after you’ve lost everything you really, truly cared about?
Miley Styles (I See The Devil)
There's a boy whose affection I am determined to hunt down and kill. It used to be material objects I felt I needed to be happy. It would make me feel stable if I had him. If I had someone like him, it would prove that I'm stable, and then I wouldn't have to do the work to get there. I am constantly looking for ways to cede control of my worries to someone, anyone.
Emma Forrest (Your Voice in My Head)
By the early 1970s, when I went to college, everything you heard about LSD seemed calculated to terrify. It worked on me: I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked. I also had my own personal reason for steering clear of psychedelics: a painfully anxious adolescence that left me (and at least one psychiatrist) doubting my grip on sanity.
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
Hope is very often a refusal to know what is so, and steadfastly it is a refusal to live as if the present moment is good enough and all we really have. Hopeless is the collapse of that refusal, and it looks a lot like depression
Stephen Jenkinson (Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul)
Things I've Learned in 18 Years of Life   1) True love is not something found, rather [sic] something encountered. You can’t go out and look for it. The person you marry and the person you love could easily be two different people. So have a beautiful life while waiting for God to bring along your once-in-a-lifetime love. Don't allow yourself to settle for anything less than them. Stop worrying about who you're going to marry because God's already on the front porch watching your grandchildren play.   2) God WILL give you more than you can handle, so you can learn to lean on him in times of need. He won't tempt you more than you can handle, though. So don't lose hope. Hope anchors the soul.   3) Remember who you are and where you came from. Remember that you are not from this earth. You are a child of heaven, you're invaluable, you are beautiful. Carry yourself that way.   4) Don't put your faith in humanity, humanity is inherently flawed. We are all imperfect people created and loved by a perfect God. Perfect. So put your faith in Him.   5) I fail daily, and that is why I succeed.   6) Time passes, and nothing and everything changes. Don't live life half asleep. Don't drag your soul through the days. Feel everything you do. Be there physically and mentally. Do things that make you feel this way as well.   7) Live for beauty. We all need beauty, get it where you can find it. Clothing, paintings, sculptures, music, tattoos, nature, literature, makeup. It's all art and it's what makes us human. Same as feeling the things we do. Stay human.   8) If someone makes you think, keep them. If someone makes you feel, keep them.   9) There is nothing the human brain cannot do. You can change anything about yourself that you want to. Fight for it. It's all a mental game.   10) God didn’t break our chains for us to be bound again. Alcohol, drugs, depression, addiction, toxic relationships, monotony and repetition, they bind us. Break those chains. Destroy your past and give yourself new life like God has given you.   11) This is your life. Your struggle, your happiness, your sorrow, and your success. You do not need to justify yourself to anyone. You owe no one an explanation for the choices that you make and the position you are in. In the same vein, respect yourself by not comparing your journey to anyone else's.   12) There is no wrong way to feel.   13) Knowledge is everywhere, keep your eyes open. Look at how diverse and wonderful this world is. Are you going to miss out on beautiful people, places, experiences, and ideas because you are close-minded? I sure hope not.   14) Selfless actions always benefit you more than the recipient.   15) There is really no room for regret in this life. Everything happens for a reason. If you can't find that reason, accept there is one and move on.   16) There is room, however, for guilt. Resolve everything when it first comes up. That's not only having integrity, but also taking care of your emotional well-being.   17) If the question is ‘Am I strong enough for this?’ The answer is always, ‘Yes, but not on your own.’   18) Mental health and sanity above all.   19) We love because He first loved us. The capacity to love is the ultimate gift, the ultimate passion, euphoria, and satisfaction. We have all of that because He first loved us. If you think about it in those terms, it is easy to love Him. Just by thinking of how much He loves us.   20) From destruction comes creation. Beauty will rise from the ashes.   21) Many things can cause depression. Such as knowing you aren't becoming the person you have the potential to become. Choose happiness and change. The sooner the better, and the easier.   22) Half of happiness is as simple as eating right and exercising. You are one big chemical reaction. So are your emotions. Give your body the right reactants to work with and you'll be satisfied with the products.
Scott Hildreth (Broken People)
Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity. These are not the kind of people who really need to get hung up in depressing political trips. They are not ready for it. Their boats are rocking so badly that all they want to do is get level long enough to think straight and avoid the next nightmare. This girl I was delivering up to the chicken coop was one of those people. She was terrified of almost everything, including me, and this made me very uncomfortable.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72)
Like many fellow travelers who’ve crossed the Styx and returned, I view the itinerary as transformational. On the one hand, I won’t join that cohort claiming gratitude for their time in hell; on the other, I can say that in the wake of my depression, I’m pierced by other people as I wasn’t before, that I waste less time entertaining myself, and that I hear my thoughts with a useful attention to their tenor, fairness, and sanity. I feel equanimous most of the time, and have a strong impulse to give. My life has become, if you will, intentional, in a way it might not be if I hadn’t made my plummet. William Styron died in 2006. During the last third of his life, after the publication of Darkness Visible, he became a mental health advocate. I’m among those aided by his account, who found in it succor, but I’m also mindful of complaints such as those in Joel P. Smith’s essay “Depression: Darker Than Darkness”—that Styron was depressed for months, not years; that he was never alone; that he had the best of treatment; that he stayed in a hospital “as comfortable as they come”; and that he didn’t have to rely on radical remedies like electroshock therapy: all of this to say that Styron didn’t plumb the depths and can’t represent the depressed, and neither can I. Others have and have had it worse. For them, depression never yields or lessens. For them there’s no rising into the light of day, no edifications, and no gains, nothing but the wish to be dead, which is, after a marathon of untenable suffering, granted. “E
David Guterson (Descent: A Memoir of Madness (Kindle Single))
Setting a goal and working to achieve it doesn’t ensure success, no matter how diligently we try, and that leads to disappointment, one of the most depressing emotions. Disappointment can make us feel powerless, and psychologists actually talk about two different types: outcome-related disappointment (when things didn’t go as we’d hoped) and person-related disappointment (when people let us down).
Jenny Taitz (How to Be Single and Happy: Science-Based Strategies for Keeping Your Sanity While Looking for a Soul Mate)
Getting drunk every Friday night and thinking that it's normal, only to get mad every Monday, looks normal only because most people are insane. It becomes abnormal when it affects your relationships and you push people you want away with a smile and cry when they're gone. That's when a person should question her own sanity. If that still doesn't make one question it, then that's a very deep stage of insanity. That's not life. That's the scenario for an apocalyptic movie.
Robin Sacredfire
But Hannah's friend didn’t understand the volatile balancing act between art and sanity, that the act of creation was like walking a tightrope during an earthquake. She didn’t understand Hannah’s stupid need for validation, or that the size of the audience increased the stakes and multiplied the fear. She didn’t understand that creativity was dangerous, that, yes, there were some people who could stand before a canvas, paint a sunset that would bring the world to its knees, and return to their loved ones as a complete person who didn’t hurt, didn’t cry, didn’t spill blood to appease the host of fickle muses. But Hannah did. Hannah’s best ideas—sometimes her only ideas—were buried beneath the skin.
Jake Vander-Ark (The Day I Wore Purple)
I won't say that writing tamed the Black Beast. It soothed him, though, enough so he agreed simply to occupy a corner of my mind...Gradually, I redirected my focus and skills towards causes much closer to my own heart: writing and mental health advocacy. [...] I felt so good at times that I even wondered, was I still bipolar? In my community work, I saw so many people who were much worse off than I was - deep in their disease in a way I no longer seemed to be. I knew that this often happens to manic-depressives: the brain forgets the ravages of the illness they way a woman forgets the pains of childbirth. You have to, to survive. But it's always a dangerous place to be, because you inevitably start to question the need for medication, therapy, and all the other rigorous stopgaps of sanity so carefully put into place to prevent another episode.
Terri Cheney (The Dark Side of Innocence: Growing Up Bipolar)
Barbara brings her chair close to mine. She says that, to the outside world, suicide could seem a rational choice for someone like her or me. After all, our shared diagnosis is terminal in many cases. “Anybody else contemplating suicide would receive intervention, because they’re assumed to be depressed and treatable. But you and me . . . ? Society is too quick to allow cripples to off themselves,” she says. In fact, society sometimes seems to encourage disabled people to get out of the way, stop being a burden or stop using up scarce resources, she goes on. It can push disabled people to the margins, where they naturally become depressed. And instead of identifying their depression as treatable—instead of creating opportunities that make their lives worth living—society (she calls it “the majority culture”) wants to push for the right to die before it’s established the right to live. “You know about Jack Kevorkian, right?” she asks.
Ben Mattlin (Miracle Boy Grows Up: How the Disability Rights Revolution Saved My Sanity)
The clear transmission of facts and evidence becomes irrelevant in the hyperemotional space of social media. Facts come from a world external to ourselves—namely, reality. Actually, that’s the whole point. But in the social media world, they are either meaningless or threatening to the self we’re constructing and protecting. The world can’t help but degrade into “It’s all about me.” Deluged with information filtered through the lens of popular self, our internal monitoring causes the world to shrink: Did the news make me feel bad? Turn it off. Did that comment upset me? Blast the messenger. Did that criticism hurt me? Get depressed or strike back. This is the tragedy of self-reference where, instead of responding to information from the external environment to create an orderly system of relationships, the narrow band of information obsessively processed creates isolation, stress, and self-defense.6 Focused internally, the outside world where facts reside doesn’t have meaning. Our communication with one another via the Web generates extreme reactions. Think about how small events take over the Internet because people get upset from a photo and minimal information. There doesn’t have to be any basis in fact or any understanding of more complex reasons for why this event happened. People see the visual, comment on it, and viral hysteria takes over. Even when more context is given later that could help people understand the event, it doesn’t change their minds. People go back to scanning and posting, and soon there is another misperceived event to get hysterical about. One commentator calls this “infectious insanity.”7
Margaret J. Wheatley (Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity)
This move is called triangulation. Jan’s claim that I was “depressed”, and she was “worried” about me were meant to make me worry that perhaps I wasn’t feeling quite right. Narcissists love making their partners or family members question their own sanity. It puts the narcissist right in the driver’s seat and makes them look like a saint for being concerned in the first place.
Don Barlow (Gaslighting & Narcissistic Abuse Recovery: Recover from Emotional Abuse, Recognize Narcissists & Manipulators and Break Free Once and for All)
I rolled around and hit my face to wake myself up, but the pain proved that everything was real - because pain is another word for reality. The surfaces were hard, indeed. My eyes were wide open and lucid, but fear had deformed everything, it had driven me into the hallucination and delirium. I stood up, shook the industrial refuse from my clothes, and went back, my heart beating more strongly than it should have, to the door gaping open in the great building's wall. I knew full well that on the outside, the building was perfectly rectangular, that there was no way for the door to open into a room, and yet it led into a virtual depth, as inexplicable as the depth of a photograph, or the depths of perspective that create a third, and false, dimension in paintings on a wall. If you could go inside a trompe l'oeil mural, you wouldn't descend into its fraudulent depths, you would only get smaller as you moved along unseen lines of perspective. You wouldn't move through constantly changing spaces, with porphyry arches and columns and unintelligible Biblical images opening and closing behind you; rather, they would change their shapes constantly, rectangles would become parallelograms and trapezoids, the arcs of circles would change into hyperbolas, and circle into ellipses, becoming thinner and thinner as they tried to look deeper and farther away. I often thought that the world, along its three dimensions, is an equally deceiving trompe l'oeil for the infinitely more complex eye of our mind, with its two cerebral hemispheres taking in the world at slightly different angles, such that, by combining rational analysis and mystical sensibility, speech and song, happiness and depression, the abject and the sublime, it will make the amazing rosebud of the fourth dimension open before us, with its pearly petals, with its full depth, with its cubic surface, with its hypercubic volume. As though an embryo didn't grow in its mother's womb but arrived, from far away, and only the illusion of perspective made it seem to grow, like a wayfarer approaching along an empty road. A wayfarer who, after he passes through the iliac portal, continues his illusory rise, first an infant, then a child, then an adolescent, and in the end, when he is face-to-face with you and looks you in the eyes, he smiles at you like a friend from the other side of the mirror, having found you again, at last.
Mircea Cărtărescu (Solenoid)
I would say that over the last ten or fifteen years, the way capitalism has developed in terms of conglomeration of power and wealth more and more in the hands of a few people and the way the media has affected how people think. What people think. I think that’s part of the technique, to just bombard people with so much bullshit information and so much bullshit that they can’t see the forest from the trees. I think it’s been highly effective. And I also think that with the defeat of any alternative, this is the reign of capitalism now — until it destroys the world or destroys itself or whatever it’s gonna do. So, I think that has been the change I have seen in the last twenty years. I don’t think that there’s an effective resistance on a large scale that can be mounted against the power that they have. It’s more a matter of them self-destructing and if there is going to be anything left for anybody else after that. If there is an after that. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t fight. In other words, I don’t feel depressed by that. People should resist any way they can. They should try and cooperate any way they can and they should try to create environments where they can maintain some kind of sanity and they should try to have some fun. If you’re stuck on this plane, you do what you can do. Otherwise, you become a complete cynical fuckhead, which is a victory for them. If you have any self respect you have to resist.
Tim Yohannan
My sanity felt like it was hanging over a pit, dangling on a frayed string that I knew was going to break - it was only a matter of when.
Sara Secora (Throne of Lies (Amethysta Trilogy, #1))
Nearly every doctor I worked with dreamed as a child about curing disease and worked like crazy to become a doctor. They studied tirelessly to learn science, entered medical school with idealistic visions, and became the pride of their family. They entered residency with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt and initially saw the chronic sleep deprivation and verbal abuse by their superiors as integral parts of the experience—because “great achievement is born of great sacrifice.” But almost universally among doctors I have met, this idealism eventually turns to cynicism. My colleagues in residency talked often about questioning their sanity, of wondering whether this was all worth it. I spoke with successful surgeons who’d drafted their resignation letters dozens of times. Another had a recurring daydream of leaving everything behind and becoming a baker. Many of my supervising physicians were desperate to spend more time with their children. I witnessed more than one tearful breakdown in the operating room when surgical cases were delayed and led to yet another missed bedtime for their kids. Several had dealt with suicidal depression. I understood why doctors had the highest burnout and suicide rate of any profession. Inevitably, these conversations led to an insight that I believe is whispered by doctors in every hospital in America: they feel trapped inside a broken system.
Casey Means (Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health)
He’s the one thread of sanity keeping me from falling into a sandpit of depression.
Willow Prescott (Breakaway (Stolen Away Series Book 2))
How might people in some other village or town rise up each morning? What does being alive mean to them? It isn't likely that they wake up every day expecting to die. They likely want to live at least as much as we do, and they want this for each other too. Experience has taught them not that life is cruel, random, arbitrary, unjust. Experience has taught them that life is unlikely, everything considered. Waking up each day, and having your children do so, is not written in the stars, not an entitlement, far from inevitable. It is not even the fair trade meritocratic consequence of being careful and living right. For all that, waking up each day is a gift. It is a gift that is not reward for playing by the rules. It is a gift from the Gods, giving each living person the capacity not just to go on, but to go on as if he or she has been gifted, to go on in gratitude and wonder that all the things of the world that keep them alive have continued while they slept. Wonder, awe, and a feeling of being on the receiving end for now of something mysteriously good: These are antidotes to depression.
Stephen Jenkinson (Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul)
It was the winter after the most depressing election of my adult life, a low point for my faith in the polls, and I had started keeping an unofficial tally in my head of how much I trusted each new white person I met. It was a pitiful tally, because I had decided most of them would forgive anyone who harmed me, would worry more about vocal antiracism ruining the holiday party season and causing the cheese plates to go to waste than about the lives and sanity of the nonwhite humans in their midst.
Danielle Evans (The Office of Historical Corrections)
The measure of our mindfulness, the touchstone for sanity in this society, is our level of productivity, our attention to responsibility, our ability to plain and simple hold down a job. If you’re still at the point where you’re even just barely going through the motions—showing up at work, paying the bills—you are still okay or okay enough. A desire not to acknowledge depression in ourselves or those close to us—better known these days as denial—is such a strong urge that plenty of people prefer to think that until you are actually flying out of a window, you don’t have a problem.
Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America)
Not only does our individual and societal sanity depend on connection; so does our physical health. Because we are biopsychosocial creatures, the rising loneliness epidemic in Western culture is much more than just a psychological phenomenon: it is a public health crisis. A preeminent scholar of loneliness, the late neuroscientist John Cacioppo and his colleague and spouse, Stephania Cacioppo, published a letter in the Lancet only a month before his death in 2018. "Imagine," they wrote, "a condition that makes a person irritable, depressed, and self-centered, and is associated with a 26% increase in the risk of premature mortality. Imagine too that in industrialized countries around a third of people are affected by this condition, with one person in 12 affected severely, and that these proportions are increasing. Income, education, sex, and ethnicity are not protective, and the condition is contagious. The effects of the condition are not attributable to some peculiarity of the character of a subset of individuals, they are a result of the condition affecting ordinary people. Such a condition exists — loneliness." We now know without doubt that chronic loneliness is associated with an elevated risk of illness and early death. It has been shown to increase mortality from cancer and other diseases and has been compared to the harm of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. According to research presented at the American Psychological Association's annual convention in 2015, the loneliness epidemic is a public health risk at least as great as the burgeoning rates of obesity. Loneliness, the researcher Steven Cole told me, can impair genetic functioning. And no wonder: even in parrots isolation impairs DNA repair by shortening chromosome-protecting telomeres. Social isolation inhibits the immune system, promotes inflammation, agitates the stress apparatus, and increases the risk of death from heart disease and strokes. Here I am referring to social isolation in the pre COVID-19 sense, though the pandemic has grievously exacerbated the problem, at great cost to the well-being of many.
Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
We are not our thoughts. As long as you confuse thoughts as who you are, you can never actually be free, for you will remain controlled by them. If your thoughts tell you stories fueled with anger and competition, you become angry and competitive. If they spin stories of fear and paranoia, you panic and have anxiety. If they grovel in shame and regret, you become depressed, and so on. Because we have never stopped to question our thoughts, we have, in turn, become obedient to them. So obedient that we even think we are the ones thinking them. We confuse thoughts as us. To question our thoughts would be to question our sense of reality and our sense of identity, maybe even our sanity. But you must have the courage to keep exploring.
Mathew Micheletti (The Inner Work: An Invitation to True Freedom and Lasting Happiness)
Is there a scale for sanity? Was I ever really insane? How insane had I been? For years I'd held onto the label of insanity as both a medal of freedom and a scarlet letter. Insanity granted me permission to do as I felt. If I wanted to take my shoes off and jump in puddles in the parking lot of a grocery store, I could. I wasn't scared of the world around me and I wasn't scared of others. Insanity had granted me permission to run through the rain naked. Insanity had also locked me in dark rooms for days. Insanity added weight to my body and then starved me. Insanity ruined friendships and relationships. Insanity gave me an excuse to not apologize. Insanity has a duality we don't discuss. I decided somewhere between Cuba and Spain that we all have a little insanity in us.
Trevor Church (The Gospel According to a Basket-Case)
Personnel will be hard to retain due to the artificially depressed salary structure. The CIO will most likely be relegated to an operational and maintenance role -- and may find this to be the only way to maintain sanity. Modern organizations should carefully avoid this very dangerous situation.
Mansur Hasib (Cybersecurity Leadership: Powering the Modern Organization)
What, then, is happiness? First of all, we must note that happiness is often confused with pleasure. From the fountains of pleasure, noted the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), there arises something of bitterness that torments us amid the flowers themselves. Or, as another poet put it, even the sweetest rose has its thorns. The particular sting of pleasure is that it is short-lived. Hence we often hunt after a pleasurable repetition, and in the process run the risk of becoming addicted. Pleasure is inherently addictive, precisely because it is not completely fulfilling. However much the pleasure, we always hunger for more. This can lead to extreme situations, such as in the case of a drug addict who forgoes everything—including propriety and sanity—in order to acquire the substance that gives him pleasure. Happiness, on the other hand, is deep, full, and enduring. It is satisfying in itself. Therefore it gives us peace and tranquillity. Whereas suffering follows in the wake of pleasure, either because the pleasure has ended or because its pursuit has led to painful imbalances, happiness has no untoward repercussions. It gives rise to harmony. The American philosopher George Santayana wrote in Little Essays, “Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”2 Happiness ends all sorrow; it concludes our frantic search for the next injection of pleasure. The person who is happy does not look for greater happiness. But pleasure always spurs us on to experience greater pleasure. It drives us, and in driving us it enslaves us. Happiness, however, sets us free. It is freedom. When we are happy we are whole. The pleasure-seeker is feeling incomplete and therefore is looking for completion, except his or her search is focused on external means that can never bring true happiness. If pleasure were the same as happiness, our Western consumer society, which provides unparalleled access to pleasures of all kinds, would produce the happiest human beings on earth. Instead, our society is filled with desperate and emotionally disturbed and spiritually unfulfilled individuals. In fact, many mental health authorities think it is the sickest society ever to exist on this planet. According to a recent poll, more than one-third of the American population is thought to suffer from one or the other mental illness—from chronic depression to schizophrenia. This is a scary figure, but not surprising when we look at our contemporary lifestyle of work, pressure, haste, drivenness, and consumerism. As long as we are spiritually fragmented, we must expect to also be physically, emotionally, and mentally unfit. Spiritual wholeness and psychosomatic well-being go hand in hand. Millions suffer from chronic diseases that are the result of emotional disturbance and wrong attitudes to life, expressed in unwholesome habits.
Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
Reliability has become scarce – commitment has become scarce – attachment has become scarce. The very socio-psychological mechanisms that sustain the stability and wellness of a society are beginning to collapse, and when they do, the very fabric of societal stability and sanity will get ripped apart, which I am afraid is no longer a possibility. This has already begun to happen and the situation will get only worse, creating a society full of sociopaths, psychopaths and basically unstable, depressed and superficial human beings with no strength of character and conscience, and no sense of patience and sanity whatsoever. They will crave for appraisal – they will crave for attention – they will crave for flattery – they will crave for perfection. Everything about them will be artificial and superficial. And no matter how much they pretend to present their life as perfect, inside they will be dying every single second of their existence.
Abhijit Naskar (The Gospel of Technology)
The research itself could depress you: New mothers who have fewer than twelve weeks off of work are more likely to experience depressive symptoms, and those with fewer than eight paid weeks off are more likely to have a decrease in their overall health. (Another recent study pinpointed twenty-four weeks as the amount of time needed for mothers to be least likely to experience depression.)
Lauren Smith Brody (The Fifth Trimester: The Working Mom's Guide to Style, Sanity, and Success After Baby)
if you want to create depression, anxiety, and a host of other emotional ailments, in one word: ruminate.
Jenny Taitz (How to Be Single and Happy: Science-Based Strategies for Keeping Your Sanity While Looking for a Soul Mate)
Ruminating isn’t only depressing for the person doing it; it upsets others.
Jenny Taitz (How to Be Single and Happy: Science-Based Strategies for Keeping Your Sanity While Looking for a Soul Mate)
You can say that if you went crazy then you were crazy, and you couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. But that isn't the way it works, not in the real world. I mean, that's the sad thing about insane people; almost all of them know perfectly well that something is seriously wrong with them; that's what makes them so scared, so depressed. They know.
Kim Stanley Robinson (Remaking History and Other Stories)
Dear, Hope Let me stay tormented The fruit of sanity is forbidden I have fucked enough poetries to know how language Exaggerates, how it deceives
Yarro Rai (Abyss : (Soul and suffering))
Because borderlines never really get better. The best you can do is help them coast, without getting sucked into their pathology. At first glance they look normal, sometimes even supernormal, holding down high-pressure jobs and excelling. But they walk a constant tightrope between madness and sanity, unable to form relationships, incapable of achieving insight, never free from a deep, corroding sense of worthlessness and rage that spills over, inevitably, into self-destruction. They’re the chronically depressed, the determinedly addictive, the compulsively divorced, living from one emotional disaster to the next.
Jonathan Kellerman (Silent Partner (Alex Delaware, #4))
Sicarius found it odd that a people could deny the belief in deities, magic, and other mysticism, but had no trouble accepting that the human spirit was eternal and lived on in some everlasting incarnation. Perhaps the other things weren’t required for the sanity of the human mind, but the idea of mortality being final was too depressing a concept to accept for those who inevitably drew closer to such an end themselves. He
Lindsay Buroker (Forged in Blood II (The Emperor's Edge, #7))
Every five years or so, my life catches me completely off guard and my inner voice starts screwing around. I have come to accept these phases, and, despite numerous initial doubts, I treat them seriously. Each phase centres on the suggestion of a major life change, regardless of whether I think I am happy at that precise time or not. These are not, initially, conscious decisions. My inner voice proposes that I’m unhappy and, to resolve this, suggests I make some alterations, presents some hare-brained idea from nowhere, lays the cards on the table and demands a decision. As ludicrous as the cards seem, and despite my protestations, they gradually start to nibble away at my sanity until my hesitation dwindles and, most of the time, I happily accept this new idea.
Keith Foskett (High and Low: How I Hiked Away From Depression Across Scotland (Outdoor Adventure Book 6))
Setting a goal and working to achieve it doesn’t ensure success, no matter how diligently we try, and that leads to disappointment, one of the most depressing emotions. Disappointment can make us feel powerless, and psychologists actually talk about two different types: outcome-related disappointment (when things didn’t go as we’d hoped) and person-related disappointment (when people let us down). Dating
Jenny Taitz (How to Be Single and Happy: Science-Based Strategies for Keeping Your Sanity While Looking for a Soul Mate)
It was the winter after the most depressing election of my adult life, a low point for my faith in the polis, and I had started keeping an unofficial tally in my head of how much I trusted each new white person I met. It was a pitiful tally, because I had decided most of them would forgive anyone who harmed me, would worry more about vocal antiracism ruining the holiday party season and causing the cheese plates to go to waste than about the lives and sanity of the nonwhite humans in their midst.
Danielle Evans