Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
ADAM PHILLIPSLovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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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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The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.
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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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We are children for a very long time.
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Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
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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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Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
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We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
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The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
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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 terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden.
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Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
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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 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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To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
ADAM PHILLIPS