Eric Kandel Quotes

I'm always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis.

I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.

Journalists do not write about human feelings.

If creative work protects a man against mental illness, it is small wonder that he pursues it with avidity; and even if the state of mind he is seeking to avoid is no more than a mild state of depression or apathy, this still constitutes a cogent reason for engaging in creative work even when it brings no obvious external benefit in its train.

Love is art, not truth. It’s like painting scenery.

How you feel? How you feel? How you feel? 25 sittin on 25 mill.

Lots of people say if you dredge too much stuff up, you'll go crazy - "You'll go insane!" But for a comedian, insanity is not a problem. It's a goal.

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

Being mad is even pleasant. But only a madman understands that.

Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.

If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.

I am unable to make any distinction between the feeling I get from life and the way I translate that feeling into painting.

Art can do much, but this maxim's most sure/A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.

My nervous system is very much weakened - nothing but painting in oil can keep me going.

I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

If you feel depressed you shouldn't go out on the street because it will show on your face and you'll give it to others. Misery is a communicable disease.

I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit.

The people who say: 'You are what you eat' have always seemed addled to me. In my opinion, you are what you think, and if you don't think, you can eat all the meat in Kansas City and still be nothing but a vegetable.

Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations. And by this, in an especial manner, we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet and what are unsavory…. And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us….All these things we endure from the brain when it is not healthy….In these ways I am of the opinion that the brain exercises the greatest power in the man.

Happiness and suffering are states of mind, and so their main causes cannot be found outside the mind.