“Yet a period’s character does affect individual character. Psychology, the study of what happens in our minds, is tightly interwoven with culture, the name we give to our beliefs, practices, and social behaviors. The scholar Andrew Delbanco goes so far… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“People expected too much, pushed themselves too hard, and therefore brought strains upon their minds that they were constitutionally incapable of withstanding.” — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“The Perspectives of Psychiatry, Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney identify four approaches to a suffering person.” — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“The individuals in great dyads will be very different from each other and very much alike. These simultaneous extremes generate the deep rapport and… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“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… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share
“creeping fear of madness often accompanies depression. Sufferers wonder if their black moods will ever lift, or if their feelings of alienation from the healthy world will deepen and widen. “These fears are at least fifty percent of what it is to be melancholy,” says Lauren Slater, a clinical psychologist who has written about her struggles with mental illness. “If… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share
“The American tradition of separation of church and state grew directly from the freethinking of the Founders. After political independence, they considered independence of… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“A person with a melancholy temperament had been fated with both an awful burden and what Byron called “a fearful gift.” The burden was… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“because of them, he worked all the harder in his thirties and forties to “make himself,” emotionally as well as materially, and go on to do the special work he longed for. Perseverance and forbearance became core aspects of Lincoln’s character, and he would one day give the same advice his law partner Stephen Logan gave him, that what matters… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share
“The distinction is essential. Fault implies a failure or weakness for which a person should be held to account, if not outright blamed. Misfortune… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“In the early nineteenth century, a new culture—a new idea about what to hope for—emerged for many Americans, centered around the independent self, under… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“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… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“Lincoln was raised in the thick of Old School Calvinism. In Kentucky and Indiana, his parents belonged to a fire-breathing sect called Separate Baptism, in which congregants heard—in the tradition of Jonathan Edward’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”—that they were bound for eternal hellfire, and nothing they could do or say or think would change… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share
“As late as 1820, families made three quarters of all goods—food, clothing, tools—for their own use.” — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
