Mental Obsession Quotes

The harder you try to forget something, the more you think about it subconsciously.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Where a man has a passion for meditating without the capacity of thinking, a particular idea fixes itself fast, and soon creates a mental disease.

There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy.

This is really the common mentality of prisoners: they read with great attention all the articles that deal with illnesses and send away for treatises and "be your own doctor" or "emergency treatments" and end up by discovering that they have at least 300 or 400 illnesses, whose symptoms they are experiencing.

He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia.

People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.

You have heard that Christ said, 'My words are spirit and they are life'. So are my words spirit and life; they will burn their way into your brain and you will never get away from them!

The thing that keeps the thoughts coming back is the power that you put in the thought that you can't think of it.

But I really can't and I actually don't like switching off because I worry that I might lose my thread, or something. I fall asleep and I hope to God that I'm going to dream about it, because then I don't have to put it down.

One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.

Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang and produce, be dint of serious thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania.

When you go further and further into starvation you chose yourself, your mind becomes totally obsessed with not eating. It's like a religion where everything is sinful, and there is a heaven at the end where you are thin and don't need energy anymore.

The passion for playing Chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world

Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .

I don't know whether endurance sports attract obsessional people, or training for endurance sports makes people obsessional... it's the chicken and the egg.

The hankering of the mind is irresistible.

When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.

Books arent written on whim or promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writings a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

Writers and filmakers, that is, people who describe the world, suffer from an occupational disease. They never experience moments in life quite spontaneously. You always look at yourself from the outside. Even as a child I always observed myself and the world. I believe that everyone who chooses this path in any way, who chooses to be a describer of life, suffers from this condition. It's like a mental obsession. It can be a great pity too. It robs you of a certain joy in spontaneity.

I don't putt face-on exclusively, but in the back on my mind I'm haunted by the notion that I'm sure it's the best way to putt.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

Sometimes I see patterns in my mind. I dream about them at night. They drive me crazy.

Fear owns me because I let it. Because I obsess over it, name it, raise it, and nurture it to become perfect. It is one of the few things in my life that I can control.

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.