Karl A. Menninger Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Attitudes are much more important than facts.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.