Top 44 Adam Phillips Quotes
#1. 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.
Adam Phillips
#2. Wanting is what we do to survive, and we want only what isn't there
Adam Phillips
#3. Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it.
Adam Phillips
#4. Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring
Adam Phillips
#5. The only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating.
Adam Phillips
#6. Falling in love, finding your passion, are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by.
Adam Phillips
#7. psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What
Adam Phillips
#8. (The French psychoanalyst Lacan suggested that the Christian injunction 'love thy neighbour as thyself' must be ironic because people hate themselves.)
Adam Phillips
#9. It is unrealistic to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children suffer in a way that adults don't always realize under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy.
Adam Phillips
#11. I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?
Adam Phillips
#12. In our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them.
Adam Phillips
#13. We can only be really realistic after we have tried our optimism out.
Adam Phillips
#14. To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
Adam Phillips
#15. Kindness - that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself - has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality).
Adam Phillips
#16. The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, 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.
Adam Phillips
#17. We need, in other words, to know something about what we don't get, and about the importance of not getting it.
Adam Phillips
#18. There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage
Adam Phillips
#19. It is difficult to enjoy people for whom we have waited too long. And in this familiar situation, which evokes such intensities of feeling, we wait and we try to do something other than waiting, and we often get bored - the boredom of protest that is always a screen for rage.
Adam Phillips
#20. We make ourselves out of the demands others make of us, and out of whatever else we can use.
Adam Phillips
#21. There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs
Adam Phillips
#22. Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities an compelling nostalgias.
Adam Phillips
#23. Satisfaction is no more the solution to frustration than certainty is the solution to skepticism.
Adam Phillips
#24. The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
Adam Phillips
#26. Before you have children, the novelist Fay Weldon once said, you can believe you are a nice person: after you have children you understand how wars start.
Adam Phillips
#27. Finding hate-objects may be every bit as essential as finding love-objects, but if one can tolerate some of one's badness
meaning recognize it as yours
then one can take some fear out of the world.
Adam Phillips
#28. Anger, then, is only for the engaged; for those with projects that matter.
Adam Phillips
#29. Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
Adam Phillips
#30. The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access
Adam Phillips
#31. Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
Adam Phillips
#32. Loneliness is the inevitable cost of looking after ourselves.
Adam Phillips
#33. Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
Adam Phillips
#34. When God is dead, kindness is permitted. When God is dead, kindness is all that people have.
Adam Phillips
#35. Everything depends on what we would rather do than change.
Adam Phillips
#36. Greed is a way of avoiding making choices: if I have everything I don't have to choose what I want. And choosing what I want means giving up some pleasures for other pleasures.
Adam Phillips
#37. Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
Adam Phillips
#38. And reality matters because it is the only thing that can satisfy us.
Adam Phillips
#39. Indeed that is what our lives are, a project of recovery and restitution; or we have to ironize our always wanting to get something back that we never had and that never existed anyway
Adam Phillips
#41. Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
Adam Phillips
#42. The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.
Adam Phillips
#43. The people we fall in love with we find singularly captivating, as are any of the people (or ideas) that inspire us, for better or for worse.
Adam Phillips
#44. We don't have relationships to get our needs met, we have relationships to discover what our needs might be.
Adam Phillips
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