Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience.
ADAM PHILLIPSSanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition.
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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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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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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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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Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
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Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
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The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
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The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
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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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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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we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
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Transgression is a quest for solitude
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Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition.
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You write to find out what you believe.
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Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
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The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .
ADAM PHILLIPS