Top 100 Laing Quotes
#1. The range of what we see and do Is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice That we fail to notice, There is little we can do To change Until we notice How failing to notice Shapes our thoughts and deeds. R. D. Laing With
Alex Pattakos
#2. Within half an hour almost all the women were drunk, a yardstick Laing had long used to measure the success of a party.
J.G. Ballard
#3. Difficult trainers were the ones most willing to take a chance with a green jockey, and Bill Chandler was a prince compared to Otto Laing.
Bev Pettersen
#4. You don't love me.. Believe me! You don't love anyone. How could you? And no one loves you. How could they? Except me, it's only because I love you that I'm telling you all this. I Love you.. R. D. Laing.
R.D. Laing
#5. What we call 'normal' [sane] is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on our experience" (R. Laing, 1967, p. 27).
Michael Guy Thompson
#6. Frank Farrelly ... must be thought of with respect (perhaps even delight?) by his clients who have so far played the game of therapy with their therapists, but, I am afraid, also a shocking example for those therapists who, in Laing's words, 'are playing at not playing a game'.
Paul Watzlawick
#7. Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.
J.G. Ballard
#8. Not for the first time Laing reflected that he and his neighbors were eager for trouble as the most effective means of enlarging their sex lives.
J.G. Ballard
#9. Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.
R.D. Laing
#10. The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.
R.D. Laing
#11. Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty?
Olivia Laing
#12. There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
R.D. Laing
#13. If the blind must lead the blind, it is as well
that the leader knows he is.
R.D. Laing
#14. The 'data' (given) of research are not so much given as taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings. We should speak of capta rather than data.
R.D. Laing
#15. Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".
R.D. Laing
#16. They'd even met, he recommended him to his own editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, suggesting Max sign up this promising young
Olivia Laing
#17. We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.
R.D. Laing
#18. Physically, Echo Spring is nothing more than a nickname for a liquor cabinet, drawn from the brand of bourbon it contains.
Olivia Laing
#19. The reason I suggest that one speaks of a false-self system is that the 'personality', false self, mask, 'front', or persona that such individuals wear may consist in an amalgam of various part-selves, none of which is so fully developed as to have a comprehensive 'personality' of its own.
R.D. Laing
#20. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
R.D. Laing
#21. I was working, but I didn't have anything like enough to do, and the bad times came in the evenings, when I went back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going on through glass, a light bulb at a time.
Olivia Laing
#22. A lot of the time I'm in the present, and I'm thinking about the past or scheming about the future and missing every present moment, instead of actually partaking of the sacrament of every present moment.
R.D. Laing
#23. Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.
R.D. Laing
#24. The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.
R.D. Laing
#25. Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul.
R.D. Laing
#26. A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon.
R.D. Laing
#27. I don't know if it's a actor thing or just growing as an adult, but the best thing I've learned is that everyone wants to do a great job, and everyone wants you to do a great job, too!
Christie Laing
#29. The family's function is to repress Eros; to induce a false consciousness of security; to deny death by avoiding life; to cut off transcendence; to believe in God, not to experience the Void; to create, in short, one-dimensional man; to promote respect, conformity, obedience. . .
R.D. Laing
#30. To be a woman and a writer is double mischief, for the world will slight her who slights "the servile house," and who would rather make odes than beds.
Dilys Laing
#31. The more you keep trying the closer you are to achieving
Saccheen Laing
#32. The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn.
R.D. Laing
#33. We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
R.D. Laing
#34. I went to a public high school, and after graduation, college wasn't really much of an option for me. I didn't believe I had the money or the grades at the time, so I continued to work and save money to support my acting career.
Christie Laing
#35. Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.
R.D. Laing
#36. A river passing through a landscape catches the world and gives it back redoubled: a shifting, glinting world more mysterious than the one we customarily inhabit. Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads,
Olivia Laing
#37. These days people spend more time trying to convince the world that their life is perfect than they spend on actually improving their lives.
Saccheen Laing
#38. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality',than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed
R.D. Laing
#39. In my downtime, I love eating. It's pretty much my favorite hobby. Discovering new restaurants and revisiting consistent favorites is one of my top things to do when not filming.
Christie Laing
#40. Loneliness grows around them, like mould or fur, a prophylactic that inhibits contact, no matter how badly contact is desired.
Olivia Laing
#41. If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies.
R.D. Laing
#42. There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.
R.D. Laing
#43. No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.
R.D. Laing
#44. Honestly, there isn't anywhere in the world that I can say I would never travel to, given the opportunity.
Christie Laing
#46. I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not.
R.D. Laing
#47. Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.
Olivia Laing
#48. Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
R.D. Laing
#49. The way out is through the door you came in.
R.D. Laing
#50. Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.
R.D. Laing
#51. Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being, a potential prophet, a new spiritual prince, a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.
R.D. Laing
#53. Life is a sexually trasmitted disese.
R.D. Laing
#54. What is to be done? We who are still half alive, living in the often fibrillating heartland of a senescent capitalism
can we do more than reflect the decay around and within us? Can we do more than sing our sad and bitter songs of disillusion and defeat?
R.D. Laing
#55. Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one's being as laughing easily or having red hair.
Olivia Laing
#56. Hopper's paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.
Olivia Laing
#57. We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
R.D. Laing
#58. We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
R.D. Laing
#59. The human mind has to ask "Who, what, whence, whither, why am I?" And it is very doubtful if the human mind can answer any of these questions.
R.D. Laing
#60. You could go two ways from there. You could keep on marinating in blame, in helpless submission to your circumstance. Or you could stop, just clean stop, and take up the liberating burden of responsibility for yourself.
Olivia Laing
#61. I, for instance, regard any particular man as finite, as one who has had a beginning and who will have an end. He has been born, and he is going to die. In the meantime, he has a body that roots him to this time and this place.
R.D. Laing
#62. Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.
R.D. Laing
#63. When it hurts,' wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, 'we return to the banks of certain rivers,
Olivia Laing
#64. Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.
R.D. Laing
#65. 99.9 per cent of the matter of all the human bodies on the planet, all 6 billion of them, takes up no more space than a single sugar cube. The rest is made up of empty space and drifts of electrons, nothing more.
Olivia Laing
#66. I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.
R.D. Laing
#67. True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
R.D. Laing
#68. Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.
R.D. Laing
#69. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.
R.D. Laing
#70. In describing one way of going mad, I shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane schizoid way of being-in-the-world to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world.
R.D. Laing
#71. At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.
Olivia Laing
#73. Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.
R.D. Laing
#74. If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know.
R.D. Laing
#75. To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can never be as disillusioning.
R.D. Laing
#76. The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
R.D. Laing
#77. But already this isn't quite right. The first apartment I had wasn't on the island at all. It was in Brooklyn Heights, a few blocks away from where I would have been living in the alternate reality of accomplished love, the ghostly other life that haunted me for almost two full years.
Olivia Laing
#78. No one has the answer: we are answer and question.
R.D. Laing
#79. Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.
R.D. Laing
#80. One cannot say everything at once.
R.D. Laing
#81. Women receive he insults of men with tolerance, having been bitten in the nipple by their toothless gums.
Dilys Laing
#82. We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
R.D. Laing
#83. No one acts or experiences in a vacuum ...
R.D. Laing
#84. There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.
Olivia Laing
#85. Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
R.D. Laing
#86. Had trouble again with twine. Mad enough to wish I was a bad tornado. Swore at God.' 18
Olivia Laing
#87. Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
R.D. Laing
#88. Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth.
Olivia Laing
#89. There are sights too beautiful to swallow. They stay on the rim of the eye; it cannot contain them.
Olivia Laing
#90. The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.
R.D. Laing
#91. [of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: 'I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny.
Olivia Laing
#92. What we take anything to be profoundly affects how we go about describing it, and how we describe something profoundly affects how we go about explaining, accounting for, or understanding what is what we are, in a sense, defining, by our description.
R.D. Laing
#93. Insanity
a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
R.D. Laing
#94. If I hazard a guess as to the most endemic, prevalent anxiety among human beings-including fear of death, abandonment, loneliness-nothing is more prevalent than the fear of one another.
R.D. Laing
#95. We must remember that we are living in an age in which the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. I cannot answer for other times and places. Perhaps it has always been so. We know it is true today.
R.D. Laing
#96. Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone.
R.D. Laing
#97. The art of writing was independently born in these four regions and I do not think it a coincidence that the advent of the written word was nourished by river water.
Olivia Laing
#98. In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.
R.D. Laing
#99. Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.
R.D. Laing
#100. Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R.D. Laing
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