Quotes from Joshua Wolf Shenk

In a modern dictionary, the noun "melancholy" has two definitions. First, it means "thoughtful or gentle sadness.

High-level creative exchange depends on both hierarchical and fluid power relationships.

ONE OF THE REASONS that depression is so problematic—and deadly, leading to many of the forty thousand suicides in the United States each year—is that people are often loath to admit they are suffering, let alone explore it in detail.

We need to be able to get wired up without overheating, and disconnect without going cold.

In the fourth century, John Cassian described a condition among his fellow monks that he called "acedia": a "weariness or distress of heart . . . akin to dejection" that took "possession" of unhappy souls and left them lazy, sluggish, restless, and solitary. Later, acedia became widely translated as sloth, one of the seven deadly sins, and blended with melancholy in the popular mind. Both required, at the very least, confession and penitence.

The American tradition of separation of church and state grew directly from the freethinking of the Founders. After political independence, they considered independence of thought and belief a logical next step.

The distinction is essential. Fault implies a failure or weakness for which a person should be held to account, if not outright blamed. Misfortune is an unhappy circumstance, something bad that has happened to a blameless good person.

In particular, he named three kinds of troubles that could beset a person with a nervous temperament: poor weather, isolation or idleness, and stressful events.

Suffering was not a punishment from beyond or a malevolent infestation of the soul. Like the earth turning on its axis or energy passing through a conductor, it was a part of the natural world, to be studied, understood, and, when possible, managed.

infinite games are constantly adjusted so that both players can remain standing.

Psychiatrists see only a biological brain disease. Psychologists see only errors in thinking. That is, if you don't like yourself, or you feel hopeless, or you see life as fundamentally dissatisfying, you've fallen victim to what researchers call "learned helplessness." By some blend of bad genes and bad experience, you have come to see the world in dark hues. Therapy and medication can help you see the world the way healthy optimists do.

Lincoln told a story of an Irish sailor who had been overtaken at sea by a heavy storm. The sailor thought he ought to pray, but didn't know how. So he fell to his knees and said, "Oh Lord! You know as well as meself that it's seldom I bodder ye, but if ye will only hear me and save me this time, bedad it will be a long time before I bodder ye again.

one cognitive symptom of depression may be the loss of optimistic, self-enhancing biases that normally protect healthy people against assaults to their self-esteem. In many instances, depressives may simply be judging themselves and the world much more accurately than non-depressed people, and finding it not a pretty place.

People actively seek to filter out painful stimuli, and while this may help them limit distress, it can also sharply distort their actual environment. "If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves," wrote Aldous Huxley, "it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.

Note the word "insight." In many cases, insight is precisely what depressed people lack: they fail to see the clearly good things about their lives. But the same forces that hold comfort at bay can lead, in the right circumstances, to valuable perspectives on the world.

balance our fundamental urge for connection with the urge to experience our own agency.

When Lincoln was thirty-two, he wrote, "I am now the most miserable man living.

Unfettered thinking generates the thousand. Analytical thinking helps us see the one that works.

Withdrawal is an essential feature of depression, and once withdrawn a person can grow steadily more awkward in company.

Many chronic depressives find simple small talk to be a Herculean challenge.

people often said that Lincoln had two distinct moods. But those who knew him well saw, as Ficklin did, that he "was naturally despondent and sad." It's not that his moods turned in a cycle, as day gives way to night, but that he lived in the night and made a strong effort to bring the sun in. "Gloom and sadness were his predominant state," said Herndon.

Yet, to the wigwam audience in Decatur, Lincoln presented a strange figure. He didn't seem euphoric, or triumphant, or even pleased. To the contrary, said a man named Johnson, observing from the convention floor, "I then thought him one of the most diffident and worst plagued men I ever saw.

Indeed, the empathy Lincoln received from the Speed family was probably unlike anything he had experienced before. He knew the kindness of friends and strangers, but never from quite such a warm, bright, well-read, and close-knit group.