Hans Selye Quotes

Any time I got in emotional turmoil, I felt sick all the time, like at any minute I would die.

I'd read things, like people criticizing me. But no one likes to read stuff about that, and probably the main thing that was getting to me was me mum's illness.

Medically speaking, there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown. Which is very annoying to discover when you're right in the middle of one.

I'm very emotional; I think I may go mad in several years' time.

Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.

I could never kill myself. I approve of suicide if you have horrible health. Otherwise it's the ultimate hissy fit.

Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there, or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It's a split that tears you apart inside.

I realize that I live on the bubble of insanity. I feel the weight of human suffering, loneliness and despair on me all the time. It's not getting easier; if anything, it's always right on the edge of my skin.

Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.

Cutting, and suicide, two very different symptoms of the same problem, are gaining on us. I personally don't know a single person who doesn't know at least two of these victims personally.

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.

It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?

I think that there are cancers of the body, but I think they are what I would call cancer of the emotional system, too. These are the kind of diseases or illnesses or sicknesses of the emotional system that are as incurable as cancer.

I was so devastated by my second divorce that I had a nervous breakdown.

Depression - it falls into that small category of things like combat that, if you haven't been in it, you can say you can imagine it all you like. But it's truly different.

The voice collects and translates your bad physical health, your emotional worries, your personal troubles.

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?

The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.

I had known a couple of people in college who went off the rails, who had significant bouts with mental illness.

I've always had this term 'mad season' in my head.

I want my characters to really overuse their coping mechanisms to the point where they break down within 300 pages.

Too much tension can do bad things to you.

I went through an extreme depression.

Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor? Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest. Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart. Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.

This is, i think, very much the Age of Anxiety, the age of the neurosis, because along with so much that weighs on our minds there is perhaps even more that grates on our nerves.