Collection of aphorisms, phrases, and quotes on mental health, understood both in its most modern and “scientific” meaning of psychological balance and well-being (a condition that for some time has been called with the horrible phrase of “mental hygiene”), and in its older, generic and so to speak “philosophical” meaning of sanity.
On Aforismi, you will find other collections of quotes related to this on psychopathology, neurosis, and psychosis.
Mental health. A condition that precedes and immediately follows the murder.
Ambrose Bierce, Dictionary of the Devil, 1911
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind to accommodate your thoughts.
Alain de Botton
Sanity is an imperfection.
Charles Bukowski, Hangover Partner, 1972
People prefer the health of the body to that of the soul. Because the flaws of the body and causing suffering to the usufructuary visible and arouse disgust and pity, those of the soul are very well hidden.
Francesco Burdin , One million days, 2001
Perfect addition to today’s urban life is a sign of severe imbalance. Only those who suffer from it are healthy. The symptoms of imbalance due to this suffering and incompatibility prove good mental health as long as they are conscious.
Guido Ceronetti, The silence of the body, 1979
If balance, in all its forms, suffocates the spirit, health extinguishes it decisively.
Emil Cioran , Quartered, 1979
The phenomena that psychotherapy tries to modify are pathological phenomena and not moral faults. It not intended to make people virtuous but to restore their health.
Roland Dalbiez , The psychoanalytic method and the Freudian doctrine, 1936
Whence the health of beasts? from thinking even less than those who feed them. Whence that of the savages? From living in a state of half-innocence or of perfect ignorance. Whence that of the monks? From not reading something graver than their missals.
Carlo Dossi , Blue Notes, 1870-1907 (posthumous, 1912/64)
Our psychoanalytic investigations of individuals have convinced us that the line between health and mental illness cannot be drawn as sharply as previously thought. Mental Health Quotes Especially concerning neuroses, unstable nuclei are found in normal individuals’ psyche regularly as large areas of everyday functioning form part of any neurotic structure. Furthermore, in life, individuals cross the boundary between health and mental illness several times in one direction or another.
Anna Freud, Adolescence is a developmental disorder, 1966
Mental health is produced only when all the instances in our psyche, the drives, the rational ego, and the ideals coincide sensibly. By adapting to the external world resolve the conflicts inherent in the entire situation.
Anna Freud, ibid
The concept of health as it has been developed in the physical field cannot be assumed on the psychic level without alterations. Physically, we are healthy as long as the various organs of the body function normally and, through their specific functioning, Mental Health Quotes contribute to a general state of well-being. Psychically, it takes more than that. Here it is not enough that every part of the psyche is intact since the various aspects of our personality pursue different goals and because these goals are often at odds with each other.
Anna Freud, ibidem Mental
health depends on achievable compromises and the resulting balance of forces between different instances and different needs.
Anna Freud, Adolescence is a developmental disorder, 1966
Mental health achieve if a man develops, until reaching complete maturity, following the characteristics and laws of human nature, and mental illnesses consist in a lack of development in this sense. Given these premises, the yardstick of mental health will not be established about individual adaptation in a given social order. Still, it must be universal, valid for all men, and able to provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of existence. Human.
Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society, 1955
What is significantly misleading when considering society members’ mental conditions is the “consensual validation” of their concepts. It is naively believed that if certain feelings or ideas are shared by most, they are right. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation itself has nothing to do with mental health. Just as there is a folie à deux , so there is a folie à millions .
Erich Fromm, ibid.
Millions of people share the same form of mental illness does not make these people healthy.
Erich Fromm, ibid
Mental health is characterized by the ability to love and create, by the liberation from incestuous ties with the clan and with the soil, Mental Health Quotes by a sense of identity based on the experience that the individual has of himself as a subject and agent of his powers. From the ability to grasp reality inside and outside of ourselves, that is, from the development of objectivity and reason.
Erich Fromm, ibidem
Mental health cannot be defined in terms of an individual’s “adaptation” to his society, but, on the contrary, must be defined in terms of society’s adaptation to human needs.
Erich Fromm, ibid
A healthy society favors man’s ability to love his fellow men, to work and create, to develop his reason and objectivity, to have a sense of himself that is based on the experience of his productive energies. An unhealthy society is a society that creates mutual hostility and distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation by others, which strips him of the sense of self except when he submits to others or becomes an automaton.
Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society, 1955
Society can have two functions: it can promote healthy human development, and it can delay it. In most cases, the community does both, and the problem is only about the extent and direction in which its positive and negative influence exert.
Erich Fromm, ibidem
The mentally healthy person is the person who lives with love, reason, and faith, who respects life, one’s own life, and that of his fellow men.
Erich Fromm, ibid
The mentally healthy person is the productive and non-alienated person: the person who lovingly connects himself to the world and who uses his reason to objectively grasp reality, who recognizes himself as a single individual entity and at the same time feels one with his fellow men, who are not subject to the irrational authority and voluntarily accepts the rational administration of conscience and reason, which continues to be born throughout his life and which considers the gift of existence as the most precious possibility.
Erich Fromm, ibidem
The aspiration for mental health, happiness, harmony, love, productivity is inherent in every human being who was not born as a moral or mental idiot.
Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society, 1955
Knowing how to forget is undoubtedly a clear symptom of physical and mental health.
Joan Fuster, Final Judgments, 1960/68
This must ask in prayers: a healthy mind in a healthy body.
Tenth June Juvenal, Satires, II century.
The health of the soul is no safer than that of the body: as far as we seem distant from the passions, the risk of letting ourselves cary away is no less than that of falling ill when we are well.
François de La Rochefoucauld , Maxims, 1678
Mental health or psychosis, the measure by the degree of convergence or divergence between two people, one of whom is, by common consent, sane.
Ronald Laing, The divided ego, 1960
From the starting point of our mental pseudo-health, everything is equivocal. This health is not proper. Our patients’ madness is a product of the destruction we impose on them and which they impose on themselves.
If being able to forget is a sign of sanity, remembering without rest is obsession and madness.
Jack London, The Wanderer of the Stars, 1915
The greater the mental health an individual acquires, the greater his ability to creatively shape the elements of life, and consequently, Mental Health Quotes Nothing is further from the truth. the more adequate his potential for freedom becomes. Therefore the counselor who helps others to overcome a personality difficulty helps them to become more accessible. Knowing how to forget is undoubtedly a clear symptom of physical and mental health.
Rollo May, The Art of Counseling, 1989
We all have a healthy part of our mind and an insane part. We negotiate between these two parties; this is my belief.
Haruki Murakami, interview on the Paris Review, 2009
What distinguishes a healthy person from a mentally ill person is that the healthy person has all diseases and the sick person only one!
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, 1930/43 (unfinished).
To some extent, mental health is a form of conformity. And to some time, insane people are non-conformists.
John Nash, interview, PBS, 2002
Objection, jumping to the side, cheerful distrust, the pleasure of mockery are signs of health: all that is absolute belongs to pathology.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good, and Evil, 1886
There is no health without mental health.
[There is no health without mental health].
David Satcher: Mental Health Quotes
First of all, if you want to feel well, worry about the spirit’s health, then also about the other, which will not cost you much effort.
Lucio Anneo Seneca , Letters to Lucilius, 62/65
This is how you must understand the health of the soul: those who are self-sufficient possess it, have faith in their strength, know that all the desires of mortals, all the graces they ask, they allow themselves have no importance for happiness. What can be added to is not perfect; Love quotes for him what can be diminished is not lasting. He who wants to have a genuinely everlasting joy must derive it from himself. Nothing is further from the truth.
Lucio Anneo Seneca , ibidem
Body health is temporary; if the doctor can recover it, he cannot guarantee it forever, and he often calls again by the same person who had already called him. The soul, on the other hand, heals once and for all.
Lucio Anneo Seneca , Letters to Lucilius, 62/65
Mental health is such a complex thing, so difficult to diagnose. What is a mental disorder? Who has mental problems? What is the difference between mental disorder, depression, and sadness? from thinking even less than those who feed them.
Tom Sturridge: Mental Health Quotes
Our refusal to recognize the differences between medicine and psychiatry – that is, between the deviance from biological norms, which we usually call “disease”, and the deviance from psychological and social norms, which we often call “mental illness” – made it possible for them to spread—the simplistic clichés of current mental health propaganda. Nothing is further from the truth. Mental Health Quotes The soul, on the other hand, heals once and for all. One of them, for example, is the deceptive slogan “Mental illness is a disease like any other”.
Thomas Szasz, Dehumanization of Man, 1970
A sane man is one who keeps the insane inside out.
aul Valéry , Bad Thoughts, 1942
