To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
ADAM PHILLIPSWanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
More Adam Phillips Quotes
-
-
To our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs
ADAM PHILLIPS -
We are children for a very long time.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
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.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
ADAM PHILLIPS -
We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
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 -
The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
ADAM PHILLIPS






