Top 100 Neurotic Quotes
#1. My basic mistake in 'The World's Greatest Lover' was that I made the leading character a neurotic kook and sent him to Hollywood. I should have made him a perfectly normal, sane, ordinary person, and sent him to Hollywood. The audience identifies with the lead character.
Gene Wilder
#2. A human being in a neurotic state might very well be compared to a bewitched person, for people caught in a neurosis are apt to behave in a manner uncongenial and destructive towards themselves as well as others.
Marie-Louise Von Franz
#3. An innings of neurotic violence, of eccentric watchfulness, of brainless impetuosity and incontinent savagery - it was an extraordinary innings, a masterpiece and it secured the Ashes for England [on Pietersen's Ashes winning innings, 2005
Simon Barnes
#4. The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions.
Ernest Becker
#5. The more neurotic and evasive a person is, the shorter the range of his interests.
Ayn Rand
#6. I just hope I don't become so blissful I become boring. I think I'll always be neurotic enough to do something weird.
Kurt Cobain
#7. So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'
Allen Ginsberg
#8. I have all my ex-girlfriends lumped into one big girlfriend I called M.A.N.D.Y.: My, Another Neurotic Disappointment? Yes.
Dana Gould
#9. For Devil's Backbone I loved it but I felt very pressured but so I was neurotic on the shoot.
Guillermo Del Toro
#10. I'm a neurotic New York Jew by birth. Creating characters is second nature to me.
Len Wein
#11. The sensitiveness claimed by neurotic is matched by their egotism: they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an even increasing amount of attention in themselves.
Marcel Proust
#12. I'm very neurotic is what my closet says about me. It's always in great order.
Kimora Lee Simmons
#13. A lot of people say I always play neurotic women. Well, who doesn't play neurotic women?
Geraldine Page
#14. Mike Royce and I have always had success writing what we know. What we know now is that we're middle-aged, neurotic and fat.
Ray Romano
#15. Healing the self means committing ourselves to a wholehearted willingness to be what and how we are-beings frail and fragile, strong and passionate, neurotic and balanced, diseased and whole, partial and complete, stingy and generous, twisted and straight, storm-tossed and quiescent, bound and free.
Paula Gunn Allen
#16. Perfectionists are neurotic people. The world is perfectly beautiful in its imperfection.
Rahul Karn
#17. Ben Stiller isn't funny - honest. Ben Stiller is very funny, and smart, and cute, too, in a neurotic, New York kind of way.
Manohla Dargis
#18. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active work project
Ernest Becker
#19. Naturally, the neurotic wants you to love him twice as much, for he's going to cut it in half anyway.
Mignon McLaughlin
#20. I've been a character actress right from the beginning. I was no more like 'Cinderella' in my real life than I was like the neurotic poet in 'Cop.'
Lesley Ann Warren
#21. I try not to be neurotic; I try to create and present healthy body image.
Kimora Lee Simmons
#22. Psychiatrists classify a person as neurotic if he suffers from his problems in living, and a psychotic if he makes others suffer.
Carl Jung
#23. Schumpeter may well have seen singles as rational. but in a survey of Americans conducted in 1957, more than half the respondents said that unmarried people were "sick", "immoral", or "neurotic," while about a third viewed them "neutrally".
Eric Klinenberg
#24. My only complaint with 'Dickie' Bird is that he requires a degree of certainty that is almost neurotic; like the man who has to keep going to the front door to make certain that he's locked it.
Mike Brearley
#25. People always tease me. They say, look at you, you went for so much psychoanalysis and you're so neurotic, you wind up marrying a girl so much younger than you.
Woody Allen
#26. That's the nice thing about being a vegetarian. You don't have to be neurotic. Selective omnivores have to be neurotic. Personally, I don't have time for all that; I don't want to get into it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#27. A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
Robert A. Heinlein
#28. The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.
Joyce Carol Oates
#29. Everyone around me was super-cool and laid back and skinny and tan and volleyball-y, and I was just this neurotic kid who was singing 'Annie Get Your Gun.'
Rachel Bloom
#30. A number of neurotic ancestors, combined with with persistent, unresolved terrors of childhood, had deprived me of the comfortable gift of natural courage.
Vera Brittain
#31. And just as the typical neurotic is unconscious of his shadow side, so the normal individual, like the neurotic, sees his shadow in his neighbour or in the man beyond the great divide.
C. G. Jung
#32. I'm incredibly neurotic and a control freak. I like the thought that if there's going to be anyone to blame it's going to be me.
Laura Marling
#33. The neurotic lies awake at night, composing letters to those he hates. He seldom thinks of dropping a line to those he loves.
Mignon McLaughlin
#34. There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.
George Bernard Shaw
#35. I prefer neurotic people. I like to hear rumblings beneath the surface.
Stephen Sondheim
#36. The Public School, he had long ago decided, was neurotic. It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.
Philip K. Dick
#37. I'm quite a neurotic thinker, quite an adrenalized person. But after meditation, I felt this beautiful serenity and selfless connection.
Russell Brand
#38. Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. Quitting acting, that's the sign of maturity.
Marlon Brando
#39. I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.
Leslie Jamison
#40. Inferiority Complex: A wholly or partly unconscious sense of inferiority, or feelings of lack of worth. The overcompensation of these feelings can lead to neurotic symptoms. Superiority Complex: Suppressing feelings that exist in an attempt to conquer an inferiority complex. According
Paul Kleinman
#41. In a show that has so many neurotic, broken beta characters, it's always fun to bring in a character who's really confident in themselves.
Elizabeth Meriwether
#42. A considerable number of persons are able to protect themselves against the outbreak of serious neurotic phenomena only through intense work.
Karl Abraham
#43. Striving for perfection is neurotic; striving for excellence is progress. Excellence is continuous improvement. There is nothing that cannot be done better or improved the next time.
Shiv Khera
#44. The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn such a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of their psychology.
Sigmund Freud
#45. During the lifetime of Japan I became very neurotic, very paranoid.
David Sylvian
#46. It is intelligent to have a plan, but neurotic to fall in love with it.
Albert Einstein
#47. I found that I had become so spinsterish that I was made neurotic not only by my life of domesticity but by the slightest derangement of my room. I would burst into a fit of weeping if the kettle was not facing due east.
Quentin Crisp
#48. I am neurotic, but I live with it. I think most people are, anyway.
Ruth Rendell
#49. If a person is open to a new world view, it can often mean that he is not firmly rooted in the reality of the old world view; as a lunatic or alienated artist, his own neurotic traits can become magnified as they tremble with the new energy pouring in from the universal source.
William Irwin Thompson
#50. Let me say to begin with: It is not neurotic to have conflict ... Conflicts within ourselves are an integral part of human life.
Karen Horney
#51. The neurotic thinks himself both Hamlet and Claudius, in a world that belongs to Polonius.
Mignon McLaughlin
#52. I try not to be but I'm super-neurotic about diet. I'm neurotic about trying not to be neurotic! I'm like every other girl. I have to try really hard my whole life to try to be fit. And I'm super-vain. And I want to wear cute clothes.
Gwen Stefani
#53. The key is to be quiet. It's not that
your mind has to be quiet. You be quiet.
You, the one inside watching the
neurotic mind, just relax.
Michael Singer
#54. The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer.
Arthur Koestler
#55. In New York, everyone's really neurotic and talks about themselves all the time.
M.I.A.
#56. This society is driven by neurotic speed and force accelerated by greed and frustration of not being able to live up to the image of men and woman we have created for ourselves; the image has nothing to do with the reality of people.
Yoko Ono
#57. Anyone who attempts to do both, to adjust to his group and at the same time pursue his individual goal, becomes neurotic.
Carl Jung
#58. The neurotic keeps minute track of his enemies; it is only his friends he is careless about.
Mignon McLaughlin
#59. In a sentence: Nature beatified the neurotic. A tendency to make quick albeit mostly false associations was deemed more evolutionarily beneficial than more reliable but equally more time-consuming rational cynicism.
John Zande
#60. The real, raw, driven-to-tears type scenes have always scared me since I was very young working as an actor. And to this very day, I get tremendously neurotic making sure nothing is forced or fake.
Rick Hoffman
#61. The more a person is inclined to gratitude, the less likely he or she is to be depressed, anxious, lonely, envious, or neurotic.
Sonja Lyubomirsky
#62. The neurotic longs to touch bottom, so at least he won't have that to worry about anymore.
Mignon McLaughlin
#63. He started not to answer it, but it was his agent, Mori, and if he didn't answer Mori would worry him like a neurotic puppy with a urinary tract infection needing to go piss in the snow.' (Aiden)
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#64. In general, certain conclusions are possible from these data. They fail to prove that psychotherapy, Freudian or otherwise, facilitates the recovery of neurotic patients.
Hans Eysenck
#65. Neurotic: someone who can go from the bottom to the top, and back again, without ever once touching the middle.
Mignon McLaughlin
#66. ... the neurotic torture of being seductive regularly - by the night: the more that perchance the struggle always is unconscious.
Mary MacLane
#67. I've become a guy who's like a complaining, whining neurotic.
Billy Corgan
#68. Neurotic behavior is quite predictable. Healthy behavior is unpredictable.
Carl Rogers
#69. All successful people these days seem to be neurotic. Perhaps we should stop being sorry for them and start being sorry for me - for being so confounded normal.
Deborah Kerr
#70. As we are human, we can't do what we can't do; as we're neurotic, we can't do what we can.
Mignon McLaughlin
#71. I'm pretty private about my neuroses. You're not neurotic if you talk to yourself - everyone does - you're only neurotic if you hear an answer.
Rachel Weisz
#72. I hate the crazy, neurotic characters beyond a certain point.
Len Wein
#73. No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
Sigmund Freud
#74. I don't like doing interviews. I'm not pretending to be some super neurotic, hiding in my closet. I could care less about anybody knowing who I am, but I realize this is part of the game. Maybe if I really hated this whole public thing, I would go do plays in Hoboken.
Jared Leto
#75. The most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic.
John Bradshaw
#76. The neurotic who learns to laugh at himself may be on the way to self-management, perhaps to cure.11
Viktor E. Frankl
#77. Doesn't your work interest you, Esther?
You know, Esther, you've got the perfect setup of a true neurotic.
You'll never get anywhere like that, you'll never get anywhere like that, you'll never get anywhere like that.
Sylvia Plath
#78. Emotion manifests itself simultaneously with an alteration of the internal secretions, the circulation, blood pressure, respiration, etc., but equally, unconscious contents excite, and in neurotic cases disturb, the sympathetic nervous system either directly, or indirectly, via the emotions aroused.
Erich Neumann
#79. Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.
Judith Viorst
#80. I'm fairly competant as a director and actor, but I am Mr. Neurotic as a writer. I just don't have enough confidence in my abilities to take criticism well. I take it personally. Start with 'It's a masterpiece,' and then tell me what you think could be changed.
Tim Robbins
#81. The Council of Fashion Designers of America is a national neurotic society of creative leaders in various fields of fashion.
Oscar De La Renta
#82. Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.
Anatole France
#83. We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.
Lillian Hellman
#84. There is a tendency to consider anything in human behavior that is unusual, not well known, or not well understood, as neurotic, psychopathic, immature, perverse, or the expression of some other sort of psychologic disturbance.
Alfred Kinsey
#85. "My door is always open - bring me your problems." This is guaranteed to turn on every whiner, lackey and neurotic on the property.
Robert Six
#86. The neurotic doesn't know how to cope with his emotional bills; some he keeps paying over and over, others he never pays at all.
Mignon McLaughlin
#87. Differentiating from parental introjects and psychological defences based on the emotional pain of childhood is essential not only for neurotic or seriously disturbed individuals; it is a central developmental issue in every person's life.
Lisa Firestone
#88. I'm neurotic about children. I see dangers everywhere - sharp corners, stairs.
Tamsin Egerton
#89. There are three iron links in the neurotic's chain: unloving, unlovable, unloved.
Mignon McLaughlin
#90. I'm completely neurotic, totally anxious and high-strung all the time.
Taylor Momsen
#91. Motherhood has helped me to stop overanalyzing things. It's been liberating because I used to be somewhat neurotic. I attribute that to having something bigger than myself.
Idina Menzel
#92. I have the sort of temperament where I try not to over think things, I don't get flustered and I don't panic. I'm not overly neurotic.
Tom Bennett
#93. Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols and mottoes were full of meaning and novels weren't neurotic, but could aim themselves simply and purely at transcendent feeling.
Zadie Smith
#94. We're all animals, but we're a different sort of animal. Maybe they're better than us. They're more loyal. They're more pure. They're more simple. They're not neurotic. Well, there are some neurotic dogs.
Kevin Kline
#96. As long as you're neurotic and crazy, he's great. But once he solves all your problems, he becomes the problem.
Candace Bushnell
#97. The neurotic's strongest fantasy is that he has no fantasies. The real is very real to him, the unreal even more so.
Mignon McLaughlin
#98. Saturdays and Mondays were Sundays' bookends. On Saturdays preachers were neurotic planning what they would say, and on Mondays they were neurotic for having said it."7
Calvin Miller
#99. When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.
Paul Auster
#100. And I know I'm paranoid and neurotic, I've made a career out of it.
Thom Yorke
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