“It isn t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
“Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.”
“No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.”
“Sensation tell us a thing is. Thinking tell us what it is this thing is. Feeling tells us what this thing is to us.”
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”
“One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”
“Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.”
“One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.”
“Character forms a life regardless of how obscurely that life is lived and how little light falls on it from the stars.”
“Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.”
“If you want to be proud of yourself, then do things in which you can take pride”
“PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions.”
“Typically, people who exercise, start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed. Exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.”
“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud. —address to the Society for Psychical Research in England”
“We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”
“I am a lover of what is, not because I m a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.”
“It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.”