Miguel de Unamuno Quotes

I am strongly convinced that not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.

It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions.

Individual consciousness is just sickness.

But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.

The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century.

I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.

What a mysterious thing madness is. I have watched patients whose lips are forever sealed in a perpetual silence. They live, breathe, eat; the human form is there, but that something, which the body can live without, but which cannot exist without the body, was missing.

What do we mean by 'crazy?' What do we mean by 'mad?' At what point is a person just different and at what point can we call it a disease and say that they are not responsible for their actions? Or are we all slaves to the chemical processes that go on in our brains?

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.

I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place.

Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.

I am not a madman or a nut.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

Tell me, do you think I'm going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.

Certainly, I think being depressed is absolutely part of the human condition, it has to be, if there's joy there's its opposite, and it's something you ride if you possibly can.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

I teach that all men are mad.

When I was suffering with depression, people weren't talking about depression. It had a stigma.

You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident.

Being mentally ill is not a joke. It is a most painful thing.

Depression is incredibly pervasive and thus important to talk about.

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.

I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

Awareness of insanity does not make one any less insane. Awareness of drowning does not make one any less of a drowning person--it only adds the burden of panic