Robert Bly Quotes

Consciousness is a disease.

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

I know a lot of people with obsessive qualities, and there's a positive and negative part to it. There's the appeal of someone who's so deadly focused on something that they want or desire - there's a dedication and a single-mindedness that's great. But then if it goes on too long it becomes a psychosis. What's the French term for it? Idee fixe.

You don't have to be a creative maverick to have a troubled mind. You just have to be human. There is no 'us' and 'them.' No one is one hundred per cent healthy, physically or mentally.

Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.

The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th 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?

I do not think that obsession is funny or that not being able to stop one's intensity is funny.

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.

If you say you've had a nervous breakdown or things aren't right mentally, people run away from you. They think you're from 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest,' you know.

I have spent most of my life working with mental illness. I have been president of the world's largest association of mental-illness workers, and I am all for more funding for mental-health care and research - but not in the vain hope that it will curb violence.

Well, many insane people and seriously mentally ill people seem very reasonable.

I believe that every human being has mental challenges.

Mental health needs a great deal of attention. It's the final taboo and it needs to be faced and dealt with.

One in six people suffer depression or a chronic anxiety disorder. These are not the worried well but those in severe mental pain with conditions crippling enough to prevent them living normal lives.

Any voices or fantasies, he lives with. Those are his everyday life things.

Regardless of what people ultimately think about Crazy As Hell, It's not the type of film that, ten minutes after seeing it, you're only focused on what you want to eat.

Over recent years, urbanisation, globalisation and the destruction of local cultures has led to a rise in the prevalence of mental illness in the developing world.

The vast majority of people who have mental illness problems never hurt anybody.

One of things so bad about depression and bipolar disorder is that if you don't have prior awareness, you don't have any idea what hit you.

I am not a madman or a nut.

One in four of us will have a mental illness at some point. That is a lot of people.

You cannot intellectualize yourself out of obsession. You cannot cure yourself of it.

Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.