Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..
ADAM PHILLIPSWe are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life.
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I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?
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The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
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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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The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.
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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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The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access
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The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
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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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Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience.
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There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage
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To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable.
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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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Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
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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 ,
ADAM PHILLIPS