Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
ADAM PHILLIPSBelieving in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden.
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Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition.
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We have been taught to wish for it, but the wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults ,
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Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
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The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
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The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
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The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.
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Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience.
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Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
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When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe
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To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
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Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..
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Transgression is a quest for solitude
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we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
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There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage
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Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
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Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
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We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
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Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
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The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .
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The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
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To our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need.
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It is as if to say: if these are not valued – if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing – are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.
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We are children for a very long time.
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The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality – to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting – but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail.
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You write to find out what you believe.
ADAM PHILLIPS