Karl A. Menninger Quotes

Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.

When a trout rising to a fly gets hoooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freeely, he begins with a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of course, the situation is too tough for him. In the same way the human being struggles with his environment and with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees and it naturally misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.

What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.

Once asked what action he would recommend if a person were to feel a nervous breakdown coming on: Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, and find someone in need and do something for him.

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.

What's done to children, they will do to society.

The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal.

Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.

Love is a medicine for the sickness of the world; a prescription often given, too rarely taken.

The voice of the intelligence is soft and weak, said Freud. It is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is hissed away by hate, and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.

People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.

Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.

It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.

Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons, but one out of one.

Self love is not opposed to the love of other people. You cannot really love yourself and do yourself a favor without doing other people a favor, and vice versa.

One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.

Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.

The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius.

Neurotic means he is not as sensible as I am, and psychotic means he's even worse than my brother-in-law.

Attitudes are much more important than facts.

To "know thyself" must mean to know the malignancy of one's own instincts and to know, as well, one's power to deflect it.

Hope is an adventure, a going forward, a confident search for a rewarding life.

It was his optimism that Freud bequeathed to America and it was the optimism of our youthfulness, our freedom from the sterner, sadder tradition of Europe which enabled us to seize his gift.

Hope is a necessity for normal life and the major weapon against the suicide impulse.

We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do.

Set up as an ideal the facing of reality as honestly and as cheerfully as possible.

Police are not all bad guys. Nobody is all bad guys.

[on the voice of the intelligence] It is drowned out by the roar of fear.

We have come to see that just as the child must learn to love wisely, so he must learn to hate expeditiously, to turn destructive tendencies away from himself toward enemies that actually threaten him rather than toward the friendly and the defenseless, the more usual victims of destructive energy.

Chess is a more highly symbolic game, but the aggressions are therefore even more frankly represented in the play. It probably began as a war game; that is, the representation of a miniature battle between the forces of two kingdoms

Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us, and the new and different concept of illness and health.

TO THOSE WHO WOULD USE INTELLIGENCE IN THE BATTLE AGAINST DEATH - TO STRENGTHEN THE WILL TO LIVE AGAINST THE WISH TO DIE, AND TO REPLACE WITH LOVE THE BLIND COMPULSION TO GIVE HOSTAGES TO HATRED AS THE PRICE OF LIVING.