Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
ADAM PHILLIPSEverybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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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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The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
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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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We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
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The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.
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The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .
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Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
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The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
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To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
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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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Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
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To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable.
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There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs
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Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
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The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
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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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There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage
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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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we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
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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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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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Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
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You write to find out what you believe.
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People change, but there really are limits.
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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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One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life.
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