Mental Wreckage Quotes

Unexpected clashes between past and present may arouse a surge of bewilderment, but 'time' can be a redeemer and heal mental wreckage. Time might prove to be a dependable ally and a reliable coach to find a new inspiring sequel for the future. ("Disruption") ~ Erik Pevernagie

The purpose of forgiveness is not to make sure that someone ends up changing into what you expect them to be, as this is dominance. The purpose is actually to make your own life better, more worthy and less stressful. Forgiveness reduces the hold that the wrongdoer has over you and empowers you. ~ Stephen Richards

'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity. ~ Douglas Coupland

Magnus looked away, so as not to see the wreckage. "I wish you luck," he said. "Luck and love."
Edmund made a small bow. "I bid you good day. I think we will not meet again."
He walked away, into the inner reaches of the Institute. A few feet away, he wavered and paused, light from one of the narrow church windows turning his hair rich gold, and Magnus thought he would turn. But Edmund Herondale never looked back. ~ Cassandra Clare

Your job, with all that mental training and suffering, is just to push your line of breaking so far your opponent can't find it. ~ Greg Jackson

Yeah, we'll call you," muttered Ron as the knight disappeared, "If we ever need someone mental. ~ J.K. Rowling

Kershaw had long ago realized, apparently, that dealing with Brits was tricky. You had to listen to what a Brit was saying - which was invariably that he thought XYZ was a terrific idea and he hoped it went very well for you - while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you'd have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it. After six years working with the Brits in various theatres he'd come to the conclusion that they didn't do it on purpose. The thing was, Brits actually thought that subtext was plain text. To a Brit, the modern English language was vested with hundreds of years of unbroken history and cultural nuance, so that every single word had a host of implications depending on who said it to whom, when, and how. British soldiers, for example, gave entire reports to their commanders by the way they said 'good morning, sir' and then had to spend half an hour telling them the detail, which was why the Brits always looked bored in briefings. They could sense the trajectory of the conversation, knew the bad news was coming now and the good news now and that there was a question on the end which needed thinking about. With a bit of work they could deduce the question, too, but they always waited politely for it to be asked so that no one felt rushed. ~ Nick Harkaway

When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else. ~ Margaret Atwood

Life isn't always easy. I struggle day to day. But I choose to live life to the fullest and keep reminding myself that I am stronger than ANYTHING that stands in my way. ~ Tanya Masse

Inventive genius requires pleasurable mental activity as a condition for its vigorous exercise ~ Alfred North Whitehead

I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own. ~ Alice Notley

Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Keep fear out of your child's mind, as you would keep poison out of his body; for fear is the deadliest of mental poisons. ~ Orison Swett Marden

Since McDougall contrasts the behaviour of a
highly organised group with what has just been described,
we shall be particularly interested to learn
in what this organisation consists, and by what
factors it is produced. The author enumerates five
principal conditions '
for raising collective mental
life to a higher level.
The first and fundamental condition is that there
should be some degree of continuity of existence in
the group. This may be either material or formal:
the former, if the same individuals persist in the
group for some time; and the latter, if there is
developed within the group a system of fixed positions
which are occupied by a succession of individuals.
The second condition is that in the individual
member of the group some definite idea should be
formed of the nature, composition, functions and
capacities of the group, so that from this he may
develop an emotional relation to the group as a
whole.
The third is that the group should be brought
into interaction (perhaps in the form of rivalry) with
other groups similar to it but differing from it in
many respects.
The fourth is that the group should possess
traditions, customs and habits, and especially such as
determine the relations of its members to one
another.
The fifth is that the group should have a definite
structure, expressed in the specialisation an ~ Sigmund Freud

Reading, writing, listening to music, skipping rope, flying kites, taking long walks along the sea, hiking in the crisp mountain air, all serve a joint purpose: these self-initiated acts free us from the drudgery of life. These forms of physical and mental exercises release the mind to roam uninhibited, such collaborative types of mind and body actions take people away from their physical pains and emotional grievances. A reprieve from the crippling grind of sameness allows personal imagination to soar. Imagination, a form of dreaming, is inherently pleasant and restorative. It is within these moments of personal introspection stolen from the industry of surviving that humankind touches upon the absolute truth of life: that there must be something more to living then merely getting by; the fundamental human condition thirsts for a way to improve upon the vestment that shelters our self-absorbed lives. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In terms of instilling the values of mental toughness and work ethic, discipline is the gift that keeps on giving. ~ William Baldwin

I once knew of a girl whose story forms the substance of the diary. Whether he has seduced others I do not know ... we learn of his desire for something altogether arbitrary. With the help of his mental gifts he knew how to tempt a girl to draw her to him without caring to possess her in any stricter sense.
I can imagine him able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all then he would leave without a word let a lone a declaration a promise.
The unhappy girl would retain the consciousness of it with double bitterness because there was not the slightest thing she could appeal to. She could only be constantly tossed about in a terrible witches' dance at one moment reproaching herself forgiving him at another reproaching him and then since the relationship would only have been actual in a figurative sense she would constantly have to contend with the doubt that the whole thing might only have been an imagination. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better. ~ John Forbes Nash, Jr.

I sat with my feet up on my desk and started to make a mental list of the people who'd want me dead. Once I got to fifty, I decided this wasn't helping. ~ Melody Malone

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically defineable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time. ~ Harold S. Kushner

My story is not a sad story; it's a real one. It's a story about a girl who fought through a storm she thought would never end. ~ Hannah Blum

Many people are so imprisoned in their minds that the beauty of nature does not really exist for them. They might say, 'What a pretty flower,' but that's just a mechanical mental labeling. Because they are not still, not present, they don't truly see the flower, don't feel it's essence, it's holiness-just as they don't know themselves, don't feel their own essence, their own holiness. ~ Eckhart Tolle

If you are sitting in the dark (due to depression) go turn the light on. If you can't find the light switch, seek the help of someone who can. ~ Stephanie Anne Allen

I think the relationship between mother and daughter is so interesting, even in a semi-normal family. Emily Thorne/Amanda Clarke's family relationship is going to be so interesting to explore. It is going to give me so many places to go. Obviously, it has been said that she is not the most stable of characters. What is interesting about that, when you think about mental health, is that young women will often come into those problems and difficulties in their 20's, so it is very possible that this will start to affect her psyche. ~ Emily VanCamp

Excerpted From Chapter Eighteen
Pacific Coast Highway ends with a sharp right turn onto Sepulveda. Approaching that intersection, I saw several cars pulled to the shoulder of the road and two fresh, black skid marks leading straight to the edge of the beach beyond Sepulveda. Halfway between the road and the water, a big red Caddy convertible lay upside down on the sand.
I parked and jogged to the wreckage. The windshield and the cloth top had collapsed, so the car was resting on its hood and trunk lid. A young man in swimming trunks and an older fellow in a suit were pulling at the driver's side door, trying to get it open. The twisted metal was resisting their efforts, but the door finally came loose just as I got there. Through the opening I could see Diana Dean sprawled across the shredded remains of her convertible top. From where I stood, she looked to be in about the same shape as her mangled red Caddy. Maybe worse. ~ H.P. Oliver

The concept of recovery is rooted in the simple yet profound realization that people who have been diagnosed with mental illness are human beings. ~ Patricia Deegan

I tell residents, if you gave me two patients with identical problems, and one of them had family at the bedside with a lot of laughter, plus photos and a quilt from home, and next door was another patient who was alone every time I came by - I'm going to be very nervous about the isolated patient's mental status. ~ Allan Hamilton

The fact to be remembered in considering... contact with [the] thought currents of others, is that we may decide the character of the thoughts that we shall receive by carefully observing the rule to think only along such lines as may be worthy of us, and which may tend to our betterment, strength, and advancement. In other words, we have the power to select our mental company. ~ Edward Walker

Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.

And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.
Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful...

...though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha.

It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.

'Cause, y'know, a human would have totally seen that one coming. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

If we studied the issue of forgiveness with a wider perspective, we are bound to opt for it after all. ~ Stephen Richards

I was scared. I couldn't not be. Being scared is what anxiety is all about. ~ Matt Haig

The prime objective of all Initiatory music in the Temples of Antiquity was to bring about physical purification and renewal, mental stimulation and alertness, spiritual exhilaration and Illumination. ~ Ambrose

Being a person who pushes himself to his or her own limits in order to become as great as he or she can possibly be means being a person who is constantly faced with some kind of fear. May it be mental or physical, may you be an athlete or a writer, YOU are facing fear, every single day, by doing something your mind or body never did before. But by overcoming that fear you take one step higher on the ladder, and the goal is to take those steps every single day. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

When our mind is calm, it reflects reality accurately, without distortion. Breathing, sitting, and walking with mindfulness calms disturbing mental formations such as anger, fear, and despair, allowing us to see reality more clearly. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous. If we make an effort to change we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle. This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other. Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biologoical, emotional and psychological nature has undergone. There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness. In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends. You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood. ~ Jean Klein

Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second.

In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience - but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry. ~ Paul Davies

A Party member is expected to have no private emotions and no respites from enthusiasm. He is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young children, is called, in Newspeak, CRIMESTOP. CRIMESTOP means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands a control over one's own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body. ~ George Orwell

I'm definitely not an outsider artist. I'm very much an insider artist. I get written about in art magazines, and I'm not, like, in a mental institution. I'm a regular guy who went to art school. ~ David Shrigley

The mental sciences? A strange synonym for magic. ~ Lindsay Buroker

A confused mind tends to be the most creative. ~ Steven Magee

When are we going to stop being afraid to push for change and begin putting into action the things we have discussed for centuries? Mental health cannot wait any longer. Lets get to work! ~ Tamara Hill

As with any form of mental self-improvement, you must learn to turn your gaze inward, concentrate on processes that usually run automatically, and try to wrest control of them so that you can apply them more mindfully. ~ Steven Pinker

It takes a long time to dissolve the bars of a mental cage. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Either way, Grayson found it ironic how such dissimilar circumstances, colleges, and mental hospitals, had led to the same awful apartment. ~ Dorothy McFalls

Have you ever wondered what it would be like', he said, 'if we could tear down the dividing walls of every house in the street? If we could see folk the way they really are after they stop talking their crappy garbage about the weather and go in and shut the door? Have you ever wondered that? If you ask me', he said,' every bastards half mental'. ~ Ian Pattison

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. ~ Erich Fromm

The most vital aspect of winning is mental attitude. ~ Phil Mahre

Both condemnation and fear can cause a Believer to live in a condition of mental torment. ~ Perry Stone

You can't make good decisions that are going to be meaningful, productive, when you lose control, and you have to maintain mental control, emotional control and to be able to perform physically up to your own particular level of competency; you have to keep your emotions under control. ~ John Wooden

MENTAL LAMENT
Anagram depicting life sentence for materialists
Kamil Ali ~ Kamil Ali