Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.
Interpretation
Thoughts are not reality, and we have the power to challenge and change them.
This quote emphasizes the distinction between our thoughts and ourselves, suggesting that we have the ability to observe our thoughts without being controlled by them. It encourages us to engage with unreasonable thoughts critically, reinforcing the idea that we are not merely victims of our mindset but rather active participants in shaping our perspective.
In practice
In a workshop on mental health, you might use this quote to discuss the importance of recognizing and challenging negative thoughts.
Being a depressive should not imply danger any more than being a man or even a human should. Mental illness isn't a them/us issue; we are all on the scale somewhere. So we must be very careful to resist ignorance and combat the stigma that leads to dangerous silence.
It can be difficult for people to talk about it, because there still is that stigma around mental illness. But I would encourage people to do that, because they'll be surprised once they do 'come out' how many other people have had similar experiences.
We need, ultimately, to be able to view mental health with the same clear-headedness we show when talking about physical health.
You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident.
You don't have to be a creative maverick to have a troubled mind. You just have to be human. There is no 'us' and 'them.' No one is one hundred per cent healthy, physically or mentally.
Teenagers are in some ways the best readers because their imaginations haven't been narrowed down by boring things like jobs and the realities of money and capitalism.
More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
It is not difficult to deprive the great majority of independent thought. But the minority who will retain an inclination to criticize must also be silenced....Public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken pubic support....When the doubt or fear expressed concerns not the success of a particular enterprise but of the whole social plan, it must be treated even more as sabotage.
It takes so much to be a king that he exists only as such. That extraneous glare that surrounds him hides him and conceals him from us; our sight breaks and is dissipated by it being filled and arrested by this strong light.
If principles can become dated, they're not principles.
I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures.
For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.
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