Gabor Mate Quotes

#1. When I'm reasonably balanced in my personal and spiritual life, I don't have difficulty finding compassion for my addicted patients.

Gabor Mate

#2. The question is never "Why the addiction?" but "Why the pain?" The research literature is unequivocal: most hard-core substance abusers come from abusive homes.

Gabor Mate

#3. Adults envy the open-hearted and open-minded explorations of children; seeing their joy and curiosity, we pine for our own capacity for wide-eyed wonder.

Gabor Mate

#4. The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.

Gabor Mate

#5. While nervous tension may be a component of stress, one can be stressed without feeling tension.

Gabor Mate

#6. In the real world there is no nature vs. nurture argument, only an infinitely complex and moment-by-moment interaction between genetic and environmental effects

Gabor Mate

#7. Addiction is pretty simple. It's what happens when peolme don't get what they need, and end up soothing themselves.

Gabor Mate

#8. Autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything.

Gabor Mate

#9. We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.

Gabor Mate

#10. I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself.

Gabor Mate

#11. When I am sharply judgmental of any other person, it's because I sense or see reflected in them some aspect of myself that I don't want to acknowledge.

Gabor Mate

#12. Olympics are coming to Vancouver in 2010 and with it the likelihood of gentrification in this neighborhood. The process has already begun. There's a fear that the politicians, eager to impress the world, will try to displace the addict population.

Gabor Mate

#13. People jeopardize their lives for the sake of making the moment livable. Nothing sways them from the habit - not illness, not the sacrifice of love and relationship, not the loss of all earthly goods, not the crushing of their dignity, not the fear of dying. The drive is that relentless.

Gabor Mate

#14. It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.

Gabor Mate

#15. The research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress: uncertainty, the lack of information and the loss of control.

Gabor Mate

#16. The acronym COAL has been proposed for this attitude of compassionate curiosity: curiosity, openness, acceptance, and love:

Gabor Mate

#17. Not why the addiction but why the pain.

Gabor Mate

#18. Strong convictions do not necessarily signal a powerful sense of self: very often quite the opposite. Intensely held beliefs may be no more than a person's unconscious effort to build a sense of self to fill what, underneath, is experienced as a vacuum.

Gabor Mate

#19. Passion creates, addiction consumes.

Gabor Mate

#20. No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.

Gabor Mate

#21. What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.

Gabor Mate

#22. Addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious. They are emotional anesthetics. Heroin and cocaine, both powerful physical painkillers, also ease psychological discomfort.

Gabor Mate

#23. The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.

Gabor Mate

#24. The United States contains less than 5 percent of the world's population but houses nearly a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Gabor Mate

#25. We may not be responsible for another's addiction or the life history that preceded it, but many painful situations could be avoided if we recognized that we are responsible for the way we ourselves enter into the interaction. And that, to put it most simply, means dealing with our own stuff.

Gabor Mate