Psychosis Quotes

• It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

  Douglas MacArthur

  Country, Peace, Fear

  Douglas MacArthur's speech to the Michigan Legislature in Lansing (May 15, 1952) as quoted in "General MacArthur Speeches and Reports 1908-1964" edited by Edward T. Imparato (p. 206), June 14, 2000.

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• Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.

  Thomas Szasz

  Doubt, Neurosis, Problem

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (1973). “The second sin”, Anchor

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• Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  Albert Einstein (2010). “The Ultimate Quotable Einstein”, p.474, Princeton University Press

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• The neurotic has problems; the psychotic has solutions.

  Thomas Szasz

  Doubt, Neurosis, Problem

  Thomas Szasz (2017). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.141, Routledge

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• Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.

  Brendan Behan

  Inspirational, People, Ireland And The Irish

  Richard's Cork Leg (1961).

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• The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Dream, Mean

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• Were I to put myself on... one of those online dating things, I would not include in my profile that I'm regularly hospitalized for psychosis. But I do know that when I get really bad, there is a place for me to go where I will feel better.

  Marya Hornbacher

  Feel Better, Dating, Profile

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• I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Truth, Thinking, Heterosexuality Is

  "Redemption songs" by Maya Jaggi, www.theguardian.com. May 28, 2004.

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• He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil. Psychosis: out of touch with reality. Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Reality, Trying, Pieces

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• This is a serious, serious condition that is also called postpartum psychosis. And that's where, literally, you get so bad that you end up either hurting the baby or killing yourself.

  Marie Osmond

  Baby, Hurt, Serious

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• All these stories are grist to the mill of the government because they build up a very useful war psychosis.

  Helen Suzman

  War, Government, Stories

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• Love is a state of temporary psychosis.

  Sigmund Freud

  Love Is, States, Temporary

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• When the depressive psychosis has become manifest, its cardinal feature seems to be a mental inhibition which renders a rapport between the patient and the external world more difficult.

  Karl Abraham

  World, Patient, Cardinals

  Karl Abraham (1968). “Selected Papers, with an Introductory Memoir by Ernest Jones”

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• Even in my first analysis of a depressive psychosis, I was immediately struck by its structural similarity with obsessional neurosis.

  Karl Abraham

  Analysis, Neurosis, Firsts

  Karl Abraham (1988). “Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, M.D.”

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• I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.

  Sam Taylor-Wood

  Artist, Two, Neurosis

  "There's something about Sam" by Simon Hattenstone, www.theguardian.com. November 27, 2009.

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• When we speak to God, we call it prayer; when God speaks back, we call it psychosis!

  Lily Tomlin

  Prayer, Speak

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• Apophenia means finding pattern or meaning where others don’t. Feelings of revelation and ecstasies usually accompany it. It has some negative connotations in psychological terminology when it implies finding meaning or pattern where none exists; and some positive ones when it implies finding something important, useful or beautiful. It thus links creativity and psychosis, genius and madness.

  Peter J. Carroll

  Beautiful, Creativity, Mean

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• It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.

  Philip K. Dick

  Dream, Way, Waking

  Philip K. Dick (2011). “Valis”, p.124, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• You have a freedom in playing the villain. You can be a lot more out there, really. And there is a joy in that. There is a joy in kind of making a zone of psychoses.

  John Travolta

  Joy, Kind, Villain

  Source: www.aboutfilm.com

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• if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. it's a distortion of nature, it goes against God's laws, for in all the world's woods and forests he did not create a single leaf the same as another.

  Paulo Coelho

  Law, Neurosis, Woods

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• The psychotic does not merely think he sees four blue bivalves with floppy wings wandering up the wall; he does see them. An hallucination is not, strictly speaking, manufactured in the brain; it is received by the brain, like any 'real' sense datum, and the patient act in response to this to-him-very-real perception of reality in as logical a way as we do to our sense data. In any way to suppose he only 'thinks he sees it' is to misunderstand totally the experience of psychosis.

  Philip K. Dick

  Wall, Real, Thinking

  Philip K. Dick (1995). “The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings”, Vintage

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• Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house

  William H. Gass

  Dream, House, Fiction

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• Intelligence is one of the greatest human gifts. But all too often a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to mental and moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can only lead to violence and pain.

  Daniel Keyes

  Pain, Self, Giving

  "Flowers For Algernon". Book by Daniel Keyes, 2012.

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• Americans are now certifiably insane. They are crazy. They are suffering a mass psychosis. They have lost their own ability to discern right from wrong.

  Joseph Farah

  Crazy, Suffering, Insane

  "Americans Must Be Crazy". static.wnd.com. April 12, 1999.

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• A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.

  Sigmund Freud

  Ego, Narcissistic, World

  Sigmund Freud (1950). “Collected Papers ...”

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