Richard Selzer Quotes

Obsessed people are not humorless at all.

I don't think any human being/artist is 100% emotionally stable, based on the human condition and our emotions that relate to it.

Depression, if it's an unconsciously elected experience, is a luxury.

I have never met anyone who wasn't confused inside.

I am well in body although considerable rumpled up in spirit.

We're all flawed human beings and we all have a cauldron of psychosis which we have to unravel as we grow older and find the way we fit in to live our lives as best as possible.

Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion.

If you didn't have anxiety, then you wouldn't have passion for anything. The reason we have anxiety is because you care and you're thoughtful.

Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.

We have a dysfunctional dream of the planet, and humans are mentally sick with a disease called fear. The symptoms of the disease are all the emotions that make humans suffer: anger, hate, sadness, envy, and betrayal. When the fear is too great, the reasoning mind begins to fail, and we call this mental illness.

Caring less what everybody else thinks, but also caring less and less about what your own mind thinks, because what your own mind thinks, sometimes, is the thing that makes you sad.

In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one.

There are a few things that deal with passion. There's Prozac.

Treating the body is really about treating the mind. It is all psychosomatic - every bit of it. No exceptions.

I try and be as normal as I can, but it's all pretty mental to be honest.

But I like my madness. There is a thrill in it unknown to such sanity as yours. ~ Book 1, Chapter 9.

Sometimes seeming happy can be self-destructive even when you're sane.

The disease of the heart is worse than the disease of the body.

I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell; I know right now you can't tell; But stay a while and maybe then you'll see; A different side of me

It may be laid down as a position which seldom deceives, that when a man cannot bear his own company, there is something wrong.

Fits of depression come over the most of us. Usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down. The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous, and the joyous not always happy.

The health of the soul is as precarious as that of the body; for when we seem secure from passions, we are no less in danger of their infection than we are of falling ill when we appear to be well.

Should you ask me if I'm happy, I'll answer that I'm not.

I'm not telling you that suicidal people aren't so far away from people who can get by; I'm telling you that people who can get by aren't so far away from being suicidal.