One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life.
ADAM PHILLIPSThe child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
More Adam Phillips Quotes
-
-
You write to find out what you believe.
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 -
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 ,
ADAM PHILLIPS -
We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
We are children for a very long time.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
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 PHILLIPS -
People change, but there really are limits.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?
ADAM PHILLIPS -
There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Transgression is a quest for solitude
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
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 terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
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 -
Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
ADAM PHILLIPS -
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.
ADAM PHILLIPS