19 Quotes by Joshua Wolf Shenk

That solitude promotes insight as well as change,” Storr continues, “has been recognized by the great religious leaders” – including the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed – “who have usually retreated from the world before returning to it to share what has been revealed to them.

His reason and his logic,” said his friend James Matheny, “swallowed up all his being.

One crucial distinction between major depression and chronic depression is that, in the latter, one largely ceases to howl in protest that the world is hard or painful. Rather, one becomes accustomed to it, expecting such hardship and greeting it with, at best, a stoic determination.

Of all the paradoxes of Lincoln’s life, none is more powerful than the fact that the man who would come to be known throughout the world – from American schoolrooms to the tribal councils of the Caucasus Mountains – was deeply mysterious to the people who knew him best. “Those who have spoken most confidently of their knowledge of his personal qualities,” wrote the Pennsylvania Republican Alexander McClure, “are, as a rule, those who saw least of them below the surface.

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.” Abramson.

They saw him as he was, a full man whose griefs and solaces and talents ran together.

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

In 1779, Jefferson proposed, for his state of Virginia, a guarantee of equality for citizens of all beliefs, and nonbeliefs – “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection,” Jefferson wrote, “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.

In Lincoln’s middle years, a loud insistence on his own woe evolved into a quiet, disciplined yearning. He yoked his feelings to a style of severe self-control, articulating a melancholy that was, more than anything, philosophical. He saw the world as a sad, difficult place from which he expected considerable suffering.