Mental Paralysis Quotes

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.

I've always felt some kind of connection to people who are kind of over-smart. People who over-think things to the point of some sort of paralysis, and I think that certainly can be me on any given day.

The more often a man feels without acting, the less he is able to act and in the long run the less he is able to feel.

I lost my ability to will things to happen.

Fear is good, for it makes us cautious and aids survival. Not so with terror. It is like slow poison, paralyzing the limbs and blurring the mind. . . Never, when in danger, ask yourself, What will they do to me? Instead think, What can I do to prevent them?

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.

Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.

Those who are truly decrepit, living corpses, so to speak, are the middle-aged, middle-class men and woman who are stuck in their comfortable grooves and imagine that the status quo will least forever or else are so frightened it won't, that they have retreated into their mental bomb shelters to wait it out.

I am completely half afraid to think.

If you think too far ahead, if you even try to think too far ahead, you'll never make it.

Man's will creates the things that paralyze his brain and brutalize his heart.

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

... my mind lay limp in an empty world.

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

Life is full of what-ifs. You can’t let it hold you back. If you do, you’re not really living at all… just kind of going through the motions with no meaning

FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER. FEAR IS THE LITTLE-DEATH THAT BRINGS TOTAL OBLITERATION.

I was on my face. I heard the count from one to 10. I kept telling myself that I had to get up, but I couldn't move. I couldn't make myself move. It was the strangest feeling.

Fear is nothing but idleness of the will.

When men think much, they can rarely decide.

I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.

In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.

There are still many different ways to get stuck, existentially stuck. Feeling like, "This is worthless. I'm wasting my time, and I would be wasting the time of someone who tried to read this." It happens all the time.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.