Psychological Vulnerability Quotes

The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.

The moment people come to know love, they run the risk of carrying hate.

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.

Each man has a breaking point, no matter how strong his spirit. Somewhere, deep inside him, there is a flaw that only the fickle cruelty of fate can find.

Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.

If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

We're all quite vulnerable human beings really.

Being overly sensitive to rejection can become a destructive virus.

When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.

Insecurity breeds treachery: if you are kind to people who hate themselves, they will hate you as well.

...all cynicism masks a failure to cope.

Madness is never that far away. It's as close as saying yes to the wrong impulse.

After my brush with the suicidal impulse, I listen with new ears to others when they speak on the subject. I think there are people who were born with that little door open, and they have to go through life knowing that they might jump through it at any moment.

I think one of the great primordial fears we have once we become conscious of our aloneness as children is the fear of losing our mother. We have that from the moment we realize we can lose her just in the supermarket. As a child, it was more terrifying than arithmetic.

It was the combination of many factors... With most people, suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty.

Acid gave me a clinical, unblinking look at madness, and I discovered I wasn't brave enough to be insane.

Mutability of temper and inconsistency with ourselves is the greatest weakness of human nature.

Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It's a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is. I know this well... Vanity and dishonesty may be vices, but they're also the first forms of protection I ever knew.

It's not a bad thing, is it, to be strong in some ways and fragile and vulnerable in others?

Your insecurity and neediness is what makes you a big neurotic ball of comedy genius.

A new study found that people who are depressed have a greater risk of stroke. Well that should cheer them up.

My problems aren't big but it doesn't necessarily take a big problem to kill me.

I'm just afraid somebody's going to stab me one day and think that my power is real and they expect me to start healing.