Unhealthy Mind Quotes & Sayings

Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one's state of mind, or one's mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one's life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. — Theodore Dalrymple

Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established. — Georges Bataille

Katie had slept through morning mass but she could still go to confession and make an effort to banish her unholy and unhealthy thoughts. Mother never asked what she was thinking and feeling on these trips; she just assumed that anything Katie had on her mind was dirty and sinful. — Carol Storm

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. — Rainer Maria Rilke

By means of meditation we can teach our minds to be calm and balanced; within this calmness is a richness and a potential, an inner knowledge which can render our lives boundlessly satisfying and meaningful. While the mind may be what traps us in unhealthy patterns of stress and imbalance, it is also the mind which can free us. Through meditation, we can tap the healing qualities of mind. — Tarthang Tulku

Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. — Oscar Wilde

His expression was somehow both cruel and dripping with affection. Devastating. And I thought perhaps I'd lost a piece of my mind, a part of my soul, because my mouth watered and my body hummed with need that bordered on unhealthy. Vivid. Violent. Dangerous. — A.L. Jackson

It may be the character of his mind, to be always in singular need of occupation. That may be, in part, natural to it; in part, the result of affliction. The less it was occupied with healthy things, the more it would be in danger of turning in the unhealthy direction. He may have observed himself, and made the discovery. — Charles Dickens

Sensitive people can identify soothing and disturbing energies, and healthy and unhealthy fields of vibration. They can even feel the frequency of the future events. — Hina Hashmi

Old unhealthy thoughts can block off inspiration and motivation. Dropping them releases a strong flow of power through the mind. — Norman Vincent Peale

Acceptance doesn't mean tolerating unhealthy relationships or problem behaviour. In relationships, acceptance has two key qualities. First, it means being willing to recognize that your partner, right here and right now, is struggling too. It means allowing for the possibility that his motivations might be good and constructive, even if it doesn't feel that way. It means not getting caught up in the belief that he's wrong or doesn't care about you, and instead embracing the possibility that he's doing the best he can. He may even be trying to make you happy--but in a way that only makes sense inside the male mind. Acceptance also means embracing the formidable task of empathizing with your partner's struggle when you least want to do so. — Shawn T. Smith

Solitary reading will enable a man to stuff himself with information, but without conversation his mind will become like a pond without an outlet-a mass of unhealthy stag-nature. It is not enough to harvest knowledge by study; the wind of talk must winnow it and blow away the chaff. Then will the clear, bright grains of wisdom be garnered, for our own use or that of others. — William Matthews

Make up your mind that you will be happy whether you are rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, happily married or unhappily married, young or old, smiling or crying. Don't wait for yourself, your family, or your surroundings to change before you can be happy within yourself. Make up your mind to be happy within yourself, right now, whatever you are, or wherever you are. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Imagine your mind as a garden and thoughts as the seeds you plant. Habitual negative, unhealthy, self-critical thoughts produce the weeds and thistles of depression, discontent, and anxiety in the garden of your mind. Luckily, the opposite is also true. Consistently planting positive, healthy, constructive thoughts will yield a crop of beautiful feelings, such as gratitude, love, and joy. — Sue Thoele

An unhealthy mind, even in a healthy body, will ultimately destroy health. — Manly Hall

A healthy mind always likes to adore others, elevate them. An unhealthy mind likes to pull everything down. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

Poverty is a state of the mind that was created as a result of unhealthy environmental factors. When you are surrounded with unhealthy environmental factors, you will think poorly, speak poorly, act and behave poorly. — Uzoma Nnadi

This body is the boat which will carry us to the other shore of the ocean of life. It must be taken care of. Unhealthy persons cannot be Yogis. Mental laziness makes us lose all lively interest in the subject, without which there will neither be the will nor the energy to practise. Doubts will arise in the mind about the truth of the science, however strong one's intellectual conviction may be, until certain peculiar psychic experiences come, as hearing or seeing at a distance, etc. These glimpses strengthen the mind and make the student persevere. Falling away ... when obtained. Some days or weeks when you are practicing, the mind will be calm and easily concentrated, and you will find yourself progressing fast. All of a sudden the progress will stop one day, and you will find yourself, as it were, stranded. Persevere. All progress proceeds by such rise and fall. — Swami Vivekananda

Do you ever get the feeling that when you show someone your affection for them, you are assaulting them? Like you should probably leave them alone? Your affection, no matter how sincere, does not necessarily mean a damn thing to the person you are giving it to. Love can corner you. When you intrude on someone with your affection, you might find yourself trying to knock a strong door down with your shoulder. Either you break the door or you break yourself. Something almost always gets broken. In my mind it runs like this:
I'm going to like you, whether you like it or not. I'll wear you down until you relent and swallow this big lie I have for you. Don't move. Don't live. I love you. — Henry Rollins

When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him. If you don't have that poison, your story will be boring and uninspired. It's like fugu: The flesh of the pufferfish is extremely tasty, but the roe, the liver, the heart can be lethally toxic. My stories are located in a dark, dangerous part of my consciousness, I feel the poison in my mind, but I can fend off a high dose of it because I have a strong body. When you are young, you are strong; so you can usually conquer the poison even without being in training. But beyond the age of 40 your strength wanes, you can no longer cope with the poison if you lead an unhealthy life. — Haruki Murakami

The organ has a mind of its own, disregarding what might be unhealthy for you. Once it's been jolted by that spark, awakened by that all-consuming flame, it plays the dirtiest game of all. With each curious beat of wanting to touch, taste, and feel love, the heart routes all logical thoughts from your brain, siphoning them out of that sucker like a thief, spitting them back out onto a highway piled high with nothing but bloody wreckage. — Gail McHugh

Every day practice emptying your mind of all unhealthy attitudes. — Norman Vincent Peale

I feel that we can't educate children who are not healthy, and we can't keep them healthy if they're not educated. There has to be a marriage between health and education. You can't learn if your mind is full of unhealthy images from daily life and confusion about right and wrong. — Joycelyn Elders

You appear to me not to have understood the nature of my body & mind. Partly from ill-health, & partly from an unhealthy & reverie-like vividness of Thoughts, & (pardon the pedantry of the phrase) a diminished Impressibility from Things, my ideas, wishes, & feelings are to a diseased degree disconnected from motion & action. In plain and natural English, I am a dreaming & therefore an indolent man. I am a Starling self-incaged, & always in the Moult, & my whole Note is, Tomorrow, & tomorrow, & tomorrow. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge