| Quotes ~
• “Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us - and those around us - more effectively. Look for the learning.” ~ Louisa May Alcott
• “Conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty.” ~ Louisa May Alcott
• “The expectation of an unpleasantness is more terrible than the thing itself.” ~ Marie Bashkirtseff
• “Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead. ~ Charles Bukowski”
• “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.” ~ William S. Burroughs
• “A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.” ~ Winston Churchill
• “I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.” ~ Rene Descartes
• “I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.” ~ Erasmus
• “Like the herd animals we are, we sniff warily at the strange one among us.” ~ Loren Eiseley
• “Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.” ~ Robert Graves
• “Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.” ~ Seamus Heaney
• “Mark this well, you proud men of action! you are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” ~ Heinrich Heine
• “A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.”~ Robert Heinlein
• “One of the sanest, surest, and most generous joys of life comes from being happy over the good fortune of others.” ~ Robert Heinlein
• “Worry is interest paid on a trouble before it is due.” ~ William R. Inge
• “Old age is not a disease - it is strength and survivorship, triumph over all kinds of vicissitudes and disappointments, trials and illnesses.” ~ Maggie Kuhn
• “What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?”~ Ursula Le Guin
• “Our truest responsibility to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find the truth.” ~ Madeleine L'Engle
• “How sick one gets of being ‘good,’ how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.” Alice James
• “If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick.” ~ Ben Jonson
• “Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.” ~ Walter Lippmann
• “Obsession is the single most wasteful human activity, because with an obsession you keep coming back and back and back to the same question and never get an answer.” ~ Norman Mailer
• “The unconscious in us warns us that in art we have to follow one particular path. And if we follow it, it is not the sign of an unconscious act. On the contrary, it shows that there is in our ordinary consciousness a greater awareness of our unconsciousness.” ~ Piet Mondrian
• “Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”~ Friedrich Nietzsche
• “In middle age we are apt to reach the horrifying conclusion that all sorrow, all pain, all passionate regret and loss and bitter disillusionment are self-made.” ~ Kathleen Norris
• “It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.” ~ Adrienne Rich
• “The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one--and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! ....So the poet is actually a thief of Fire!” ~ Arthur Rimbaud
• “I am not an abstract painter. I am not interested in the relationship between form and color. The only thing I care about is the expression of man's basic emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, destiny.” ~ Mark Rothko
• “I have loved to the point of madness, that which is called madness, that which to me is the only sensible way to love.” ~ Francoise Sagan
• “Depression is rage spread thin.” ~ George Santayana
• “The poet is a madman lost in adventure.” ~ Paul Verlaine
FYI - America's Founding Father Patrick Henry first wife Sarah became mentally ill around 1771. The local doctor and his friends advocated her being locked up in a cell at the public hospital in Williamsburg. Henry, appalled by the windowless brick cell with nothing more than a straw mattress and chamber pot, prepared a private, two-room apartment for her in the basement of their home. He personally cared for her till the end of her life in 1775. She was denied burial in the churchyard because she was possessed by the devil and Henry buried her close to their home and planted a lilac bush beside the grave. ... Brings a deeper appreciation to “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!”.
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