These mental illness quotes will inspire you. Mental illnesses are health conditions involving changes in emotion, thinking, or behavior (or a combination of these).
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging mental illness quotes, mental illness sayings, and mental illness proverbs.
Best Mental Illness Quotes
- “Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
- “You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.” ~ Robin Williams
- “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” ~ Sigmund Freud
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“If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.” ~ Carl Jung
- “Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.” ~ William J. Clinton
- “My goal is to see that mental illness is treated like cancer.” ~ Jane Pauley
- “Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Sanity remains defined simply by the ability to cope with insane conditions.” ~ Anna Castillo
- “Insane people are always sure they’re just fine. It’s only the sane people who are willing to admit they’re crazy.” ~ Nora Ephron
- “Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” ~ John Lennon
- “Psychiatry’s a young science. Yesterday’s madman may be tomorrow’s genius. Beethoven and Van Gogh were both a bit loopy. In my view, most madmen are remarkable. They’re explorers, travelers beyond the rim of consciousness. Not surprising if they pick up a few bugs and get sick. That’s all it is, madness. Mad just means sick. If you get fluid on the lungs it’s pleurisy. If it’s fluid on the brain, it’s insanity.” ~ Clare Boylan
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“Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.” ~ R. D. Laing
- “I kept pushing against the black, though, almost a reflex. I wasn’t trying to lift it. I was just resisting. Not allowing it to crush me completely. I wasn’t Atlas, and the black felt as heavy as a planet; I couldn’t shoulder it. All I could do was not be entirely obliterated.” ~ Stephenie Meyer
- “He realized now that a lot of the problem had been his own mind, which was usually moving at a speed ten or twenty times that of his classmates. They had thought him strange, weird, or even suicidal, depending on the escapade in question, but maybe it had been a simple case of mental overdrive-if anything about being in constant mental overdrive was simple. Anyway, it was the sort of thing you got under control after a while-you got it under control or you found outlets for it.” ~ Stephen King
- “I think wanting to write is a fundamental sign of disease and discomfort. I don’t think people who are comfortable want to write.” ~ Kay Redfield Jamison
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“Psychoanalysts believe that the only “normal” people are those who cause not trouble to either themselves or anyone else.” ~ A. J. P. Taylor
- “[I] learned … that friends are a good source of food and soul when one has not yet gotten the hang of cooking or living (as opposed to dying) alone. That nothing-not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state-will make the past disappear. Only time and patience heal things. I learned that cutting up your arms in an attempt to make the pain move from inside to outside, from soul to skin, is futile. That death is a cop-out. I tried all of these things.” ~ Marya Hornbacher
- “You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.” ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
- “She wished some help would come from outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual asserts himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love.” ~ D. H. Lawrence
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“Part of being sane is being a little bit crazy.” ~ Janet C. Long
- “I can’t sleep with you tonight, baby, my head’s all messed up, you’ve no idea. It’s somewhere else and it’s full of voices and songs and bad things.” ~ Hanif Kureishi
- “I may be a lunatic, but then, wasn’t my lunacy caused by a monster that lurks at the bottom of every human mind? Those who call me a madman and spurn me may become lunatics tomorrow. They harbor the same monster.” ~ Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
- “Recovering from the suicide of a loved one, you need all the help you can get.” ~ Judy Collins
- “When you are insane, you are busy being insane-all the time … when I was crazy, that was all I was.” ~ Sylvia Plath
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“I have gone insane. I won’t be talking with you for a while.” ~ Jennifer Lynch
- “I began to think that melancholy was a dialect that only some people knew-or could even hear-and in my conversations, I sought these people out.” ~ Virginia Heffernan
- “When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all.” ~ Robert M. Pirsig
- “His impression was that he had been imprisoned in a shelter deep down in the underworld of his personality, listening and biding his time while insanity rushed like spring flood through the upper layer of his soul, roaring and crashing, leaving terrible destruction in its wake, a deserted, ravaged country. No, he hadn’t been crazy, but something inside him had been crazy.” ~ Christer Kihlman
- “But you learn to smother the living breathing soul, go deaf to it, and this violence to the self is what is commonly called sanity in the places where I have lived.” ~ Philip O Ceallaigh
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“Moods should be heard but never danced to.” ~ Hugh Prather
- “I have a plan-to go mad.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity in doubt.” ~ Alexander Lowen
- “When you’re surrounded by all these people, it can be even lonelier than when you’re by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don’t feel like you can trust anybody or talk to anybody, you feel like you’re really alone.” ~ Fiona Apple
- “Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.” ~ Sylvia Plath
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“Don’t go to bed with any woman crazier than you are.” ~ Frank Zappa
- “Maybe people are more like the earth than we know. Maybe they have fault lines that sooner or later are going to split open under pressure.” ~ Rebecca Wells
- “I didn’t want to do a zoo show. I didn’t want to do a study of someone with mental illness. I just wanted to show someone who was trying to live their life.” ~ Daniel Craig , Mental illness quotes life
- “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?” ~ Aristotle
- “Sometimes I think that it is enough to say that if we don’t sit down and shut up once in a while we’ll lose our minds even earlier than we had expected. Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.” ~ Joan Baez
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“I am not mad; I would to heaven I were! For then, ’tis like I should forget myself; O, if I could, what grief should I forget!” ~ William Shakespeare
- “There is a pleasure in being mad, which none but madmen know.” ~ John Dryden
- “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” ~ Jack Kerouac
- “I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.” ~ John Steinbeck
- “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“I will find a way out or make one.” ~ Robert Peary
- “I’m a happy-go-lucky manic-depressive. It does get very deep and dark for me, and it gets scary at times when I feel I can’t pull out of it. But I don’t consider myself negative-negative. I’m positive-negative.” ~ Tim Burton
- “And of course you are mad, if by a madman we mean a mind that questions and rejects every civilized norm.” ~ Stephen Fry
- “People often write me and ask how I keep my wood floors so clean when I live with a child and a dog, and my answer is that I use a technique called Suffering From a Mental Illness.” ~ Heather Armstrong
- “Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent” ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel
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“Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.” ~ Euripides
- “Psychoanalysis is the mental illness it purports to cure” ~ Karl Kraus
- “Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.” ~ Karl Kraus
- “The Failure of Will theory is equally popular with people who are not depressed. Get out and take your mind off yourself, they say. You’re too self-absorbed. This is just about the stupidest thing you can say to a depressed person, and it is said every day to depressed people all over this country. And if it isn’t that, it’s Shut up and take your Prozac.” ~ Chase Twichell
- “The madhouse is in a lot of places, not just a hospital, not just a palace, but also a pattern woven from threads so fine that no one can distinguish them, neither the Emperor nor the children, neither you nor I.” ~ Einar Mar Guðmundsson
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“I don’t know why I feel so crazy…I feel like I’m going through a stargate. Maybe it’s the diet pills. Maybe it’s Buddha.” ~ Dawn French
- “You know those drugstore kits that tell you when you’re pregnant? They should have one that tells you when you’re sane.” ~ Kristin Scott Thomas
- “It’s great to be young and insane.” ~ Michael Keaton
- “What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?” ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
- “Among writers, if you don’t have a therapist, it’s like saying you don’t keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It’s a natural accompaniment.” ~ Amy Tan
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“What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
- “I think love lyrics have contributed to the general aura of bad mental health in America.” ~ Frank Zappa , Mental illness quotes health
- “Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” ~ Blaise Pascal
- “The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they’re okay, then it’s you.” ~ Rita Mae Brown
- “The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
