Top 20 Quotes & Sayings by Adam Phillips

The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.

To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.

Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable. Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition. When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.

People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.

Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.

Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.

The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access

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. 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.

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.

You write to find out what you believe.

Transgression is a quest for solitude

There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage

I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.

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 , to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.

Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.

Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.

The past influences everything and dictates nothing.

The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .. Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’

There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs