Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
ADAM PHILLIPSTragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
ADAM PHILLIPSPeople change, but there really are limits.
ADAM PHILLIPSSanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience.
ADAM PHILLIPSOne thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life.
ADAM PHILLIPSBelieving in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
ADAM PHILLIPSLovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
ADAM PHILLIPSWhen we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe
ADAM PHILLIPSThe 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.
ADAM PHILLIPSI am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?
ADAM PHILLIPSTo grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
ADAM PHILLIPSWe are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
ADAM PHILLIPSTransgression is a quest for solitude
ADAM PHILLIPSThe child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access
ADAM PHILLIPSThere is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden.
ADAM PHILLIPSThe child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
ADAM PHILLIPSThe vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.
ADAM PHILLIPS