“Today, many people not only take the self for granted but struggle mightily to connect it to anything larger. In Lincoln’s time, the idea of the self had the power—tinged with uncertainty, even with danger—of something emerging and ascending.” — 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 . . .… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“creeping fear of madness often accompanies depression. Sufferers wonder if their black moods will ever lift, or if their feelings of alienation from the… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“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… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“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,… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“As late as 1820, families made three quarters of all goods—food, clothing, tools—for their own use.” — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“You say you are conservative—eminently conservative—while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“He arrived tentatively at his own idea, that melancholy arose from natural, sometimes beneficent forces. Talking about it in plain human terms was his… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
“Suffering was not a punishment from beyond or a malevolent infestation of the soul. Like the earth turning on its axis or energy passing… — Joshua Wolf Shenk Copy Share Image
