Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know I know, I think I don't know.

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.

There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia,' but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone.

We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know.

There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia', but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

Insanity a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.

Children do not give up their innate imagination curiosity dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.

The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn.

Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.

We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.

Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them?

Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, 'Studs, you're an optimist.' I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what's the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven.

You may not know it, but at the far end of despair, there is a white clearing where one is almost happy.

Law is born from despair of human nature.

If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.

This book, conceived in sorrow, composed in grief, and constructed at the brink of despair, contains my mind's best thoughts, and my soul's triumph over the powers of darkness.

Her pupils were at once her salvation and her despair. They gave her the means of supporting life, but they made life hardly worth supporting.

It is not enough to tackle the mechanics of terror organizations. We must also tackle the situations that create terrorists. We desperately need to address the frustration, the loss and the despair that drive some to these actions.

Los Angeles was an impression of failure, of disappointment, of despair, and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought.

Despair is the conclusion of fools.

Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness.

God gave you not a spirit of faithlessness, not a spirit of despair.

If you don't love it, you can't suffer thru all the despair that comes with it. Keep doing it because you love it.

The denial of our duty to act in this case is a denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed the white slaves of the North, for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.