Karl A. Menninger Quotations

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

Unrest of spirit is a mark of life.

The voice of the intelligence 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 biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.

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

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

Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

What is done to children, they will do to society.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear.

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

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

Attitudes are much more important than facts.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.