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.
ADAM PHILLIPSwe are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
More Adam Phillips Quotes
-
-
The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..
ADAM PHILLIPS -
When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe
ADAM PHILLIPS -
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 -
The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
You write to find out what you believe.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
We are children for a very long time.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Transgression is a quest for solitude
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
ADAM PHILLIPS






