"A person with a melancholy temperament had been fated with both an awful burden and what Byron called 'a fearful gift'. The burden was a sadness and despair that could tip into a state of disease. But the gift was a capacity for depth, wisdom -- even genius."
"Often understood as an emotional condition, depression is, to those who experience it, largely characterized by its thoughts...Oppressed by these thoughts, people often become hopeless."
"...Lincoln struck out into his own intellectual territory, slashing through thickets of medical theory, philosophy, and theology. He arrived tentatively at his own idea, that melancholy arose from natural, sometimes beneficent forces. Talking about it in plain human terms was his first step toward claiming his own ground as a person who, through no fault of his own, needed help."
"It is a signal feature of depression that, in times of trouble, sensible ideas, memories of good times, and optimism for the future all recede into blackness."
"In contrast, Lincoln said, harsh condemnation could no more pierce a man's heart than a rye straw could penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise."
"Calvinism saw human beings subjected to a harsh and wrathful God; Lincoln proposed that people could shape their own lives by the exercise of will."
"Drunkards, Lincoln said, should be 'pitied and compassionated, just as are the heirs of consumption and other hereditary diseases."
"...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."
"[The avoidance of idleness as a treatment of melancholy] has been often repeated. The idea is to try to set the mind on a concrete project, something outside oneself. Otherwise, the morbid, self-accusing, hopeless thoughts can take on a life of their own, creating a frenetic powerlessness, the mental equivalent of an insect trying to work its way out of a spider's web."
"What is striking about Lincoln's therapies is that they did not dampen, but rather highlighted, the essential tension of his life. Had he chosen to take high doses of opium, he might have found relief from his pain, but at the expense of a great loss of energy. Had he devoted himself to a guru or medical practitioner -- spending months each year taking the water cure or attaching himself to a talented mesmerist -- he may have found comfort in someone else's prescription for him, at the cost of a vision that he'd already come to understand -- that is, his desire to do something meaningful for which he would be remembered."
"Lincoln didn't do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy. The problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work."
"What distinguished Lincoln was his willingness to cry out to the heavens in pain and despair, and then turn, humbly and determinedly, to the work that lay before him."
"He is an example of what William James calls the 'ripe fruits of religion' - also called saintliness and enlightenment. Earlier I described it as transcendent wisdom. People who are guided by a sense of something larger than themselves will look past the petty concerns of the self - the wounded pride that comes from personal insult, for example, or the wish to seem stronger or better than other people."
"Lincoln was the first white man of power who did not manifest superiority"
"When a depressed person does get out of bed, it's usually not with a sudden insight that life is rich and valuable, but out of some creeping sense of duty or instinct for survival."
"If one desires to 'stir up the world,' it is easy to be impatient with work for the sake of work. Yet no story's end can forsake its beginning and its middle."
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