Best Karl A. Menninger Quotes

Karl A. Menninger Quotes About Education, Life, Love, Knowledge & Inspirational!  The founder of the Menninger Foundation and Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, Karl August Menninger, was an American psychiatrist. Karl was born on July 22, 1893, in Topeka, Kansas. Additionally, he completed medical school at Harvard Medical School after completing undergraduate work at Washburn University in Missouri, Indiana University in Bloomington, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In 1917, he received his diploma from Cum laude School. He was a local Alpha Delta Fraternity member while attending Washburn University. Menninger began his career as an intern in Kansas City before moving to Boston and teaching at Harvard Medical School. In 1919, he and his father returned to Topeka and opened the Menninger Clinic. The Menninger Sanitarium was built in 1925 after attracting enough investors, notably Menninger’s brother William C. Menninger. In 1930, he released The Human Mind, a book on psychiatry, which he wrote to explain the discipline.

In 1941, the Menninger Foundation was founded. Karl Menninger founded Topeka’s Winter Veterans Administration Hospital after World War II. It grew to be the world’s most extensive training facility for psychiatrists. As a founding member of the Society for General Systems Research, he had an impact on the field. Psychiatrist and founder of the Menninger School in 1946.

In 1985, the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry and Mental Health Science was renamed in his memory. When Karl Targownik arrived at the Clinic in 1952, he quickly became one of his closest confidantes. Menninger wrote many notable works during his long career. The Presidential Medal of Freedom was given to Menninger by Jimmy Carter in 1981. Abdominal cancer claimed his life on July 18, 1990.

Best Karl August Menninger Quotes

1. “Once asked what action he would recommend if a person were to feel a nervous breakdown coming on: Lock up your house, go across the railroad tracks, and find someone in need and do something for him.” -Karl A. Menninger
2. “When a trout rising to a fly gets hoooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins with a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of course, the situation is too tough for him. In the same way the human being struggles with his environment and with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees and it naturally misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.” -Karl A. Menninger
3. “Love cures people – both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.” -Karl A. Menninger
4. “What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.” -Karl A. Menninger
5. “Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.” -Karl A. Menninger
6. “Our lives are shaped by those who love us as well as those who refuse to love us.” -Karl A. Menninger
7. “What’s done to children, they will do to society.” -Karl A. Menninger
8. “The voice of the intelligence is soft and weak, said Freud. It is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is hissed away by hate, and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance.” -Karl A. Menninger
9. “People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn’t have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.” -Karl A. Menninger
10. “Love is a medicine for the sickness of the world; a prescription often given, too rarely taken.” -Karl A. Menninger
11. “Mental health problems do not affect three or four out of every five persons, but one out of one.” -Karl A. Menninger
12. “One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.” -Karl A. Menninger
13. “One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.” -Karl A. Menninger
14. “Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.” -Karl A. Menninger
15. “Attitudes are much more important than facts.” -Karl A. Menninger
16. “It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one.” -Karl A. Menninger
17. “Hope is an adventure, a going forward, a confident search for a rewarding life.” -Karl A. Menninger
18. “Self love is not opposed to the love of other people. You cannot really love yourself and do yourself a favor without doing other people a favor, and vice versa.” -Karl A. Menninger
19. “The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius.” -Karl A. Menninger
20. “Hope is a necessity for normal life and the major weapon against the suicide impulse.” -Karl A. Menninger