Top 100 Quotes About Neurosis
#1. I used to think romantic love was a neurosis shared by two, a supreme foolishness. I no longer think that. There's nothing foolish in loving anyone. Thinking you'll be loved in return is what's foolish.
Rita Mae Brown
#2. In all of our society, but especially in Hollywood, there is an obsession with perfection that can lead to self-loathing and neurosis and all that kind of stuff.
Ethan Hawke
#3. The impetus for 'The Sisters Brothers' was it occurred to me that there was no neurosis in westerns, or there's a minimal amount of it.
Patrick DeWitt
#4. It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.
Lawrence Durrell
#5. I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis. I am not an enemy of the Catholics, as I am not an enemy of the tuberculars, the myopic or the paralytics; you cannot be an enemy of the sick, only their good friend in order to help them cure themselves.
Diego Rivera
#6. Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.
Carl Jung
#7. The edge in modern painting is charged with neurosis; it meets a world that no longer confirms it but which is hostile or at best indifferent.
Andrew Graham-Dixon
#8. Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution.
Erich Fromm
#9. The very use of the term "mental illness" (rather than, say, "neurosis", "insanity", "nervous breakdown", or other euphemisms) can be seen as an effort to move certain kinds of psychological distress into the biomedical realm.
Carl Elliott
#10. The difference between what is neurosis and what is wisdom is very hard to perceive, because somehow the energy underlying both of them is the same.
Pema Chodron
#11. I'm always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis.
Loudon Wainwright III
#12. Boredom is the only sure cure for neurosis.
Mason Cooley
#13. Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Carl Jung
#14. I loved being surrounded by queer people. It was like being in a safe bubble that could only be burst by our own drama and neurosis. Which we all did without any effort.
Santino Hassell
#15. Freud is all nonsense; the secret of neurosis is to be found in the family battle of wills to see who can refuse the longest to help with the dishes.
Julian Mitchell
#16. Such questions as "Why this universe?" are a kind of intellectual neurosis, a
misuse of words in that the question sounds sensible but is actually as
meaningless as asking "Where is this universe?
Alan W. Watts
#17. The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness.
Robert Winston
#18. I was always an odd girl; I managed to alienate a lot of people. I felt like a square peg in a round hole in the music industry and created a lot of neurosis for myself.
Alison Moyet
#19. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being
Paul Tillich
#20. Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#21. The rain had stopped and the sky was absurdly pretty, a single layer of floury cloudlets pinked and peached by the rising sun. Only the juvenile, the mad, and the newly in love noticed. The rest of the city got its head down and ploughed tearily into another day of neurosis.
Glen Duncan
#22. About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically defineable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time.
Harold S. Kushner
#23. Religion: Something comparable to childhood neurosis
Sigmund Freud
#25. Meditation practice is a way of making friends with ourselves. Whether we are worthy or unworthy, that's not the point. It's developing a friendly attitude to ourselves, accepting the hidden neurosis coming through.
Chogyam Trungpa
#26. A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.
Sigmund Freud
#27. We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort.
Terence McKenna
#28. A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior.
David Brin
#29. Having been fucked up by my family and community, I'll never know where my gayness came from, and where it ends and "neurosis" begins. But as a gay person I know I'm a vital element in our civilization.
Edward Field
#30. The demands of Sex Privatization contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, causing the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance.
Shulamith Firestone
#31. Sunday neurosis, that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.
Viktor E. Frankl
#32. A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.
Sigmund Freud
#33. I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.
Sam Taylor-Wood
#34. If there is no laughter, Jesus has gone somewhere else. If there is no joy and freedom, it is not a church: it is simply a crowd of melancholy people basking in a religious neurosis. If there is no celebration, there is no real worship.
Steve Brown
#35. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#36. The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do not yet have a name.
Edward Abbey
#37. Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it.
Viktor E. Frankl
#38. There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time.
Anais Nin
#39. In so doing, the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out of their similar neurosis.
Sigmund Freud
#40. I have enough trouble living with my own neurosis without coping with other people's.
P.D. James
#41. If you can't handle your neurosis, your neurosis will handle you.
Chuck Spezzano
#42. Even in my first analysis of a depressive psychosis, I was immediately struck by its structural similarity with obsessional neurosis.
Karl Abraham
#43. My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis.
Anish Kapoor
#44. Neurosis is no worse than a bad cold; you ache all over, and it's made you a mess, but you won't die from it.
Mignon McLaughlin
#45. Happiness is your original nature, it is YOU, minus your neurosis
Robert Holden
#46. With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination?
Iain Sinclair
#47. This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects.
Sigmund Freud
#48. Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
Sigmund Freud
#49. Water creates a neurosis in golfers. The very thought of this harmless fluid robs them of their normal powers of rational thought, turns their legs to jelly, and produces a palsy of the upper limbs.
Peter Dobereiner
#50. Life calls us forth to independence, and anyone who does not heed this call because of childish laziness or timidity is threatened with neurosis. And once this has broken out, it becomes an increasingly valid reason for running away from life ...
Carl Jung
#51. I don't think you always get to see a woman on TV who is relatively neurosis-free and, while looking for a relationship, isn't man hunting and isn't cloying and isn't a fashionista.
Jordana Spiro
#52. Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient
Marcel Proust
#53. I believe that even the worst people on the planet believe that they are somehow justified in their neurosis.
John Schneider
#54. What does borderline personality mean, anyhow? It appears to be a way station between neurosis and psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche. Though to quote my post-Melvin psychiatrist: "It's what they call people whose lifestyles bother them.
Susanna Kaysen
#55. New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue the real thing.
Umberto Eco
#56. What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite... ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.
Joan Acocella
#57. Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction.
Marion Woodman
#58. One of the keys to thinking big is total focus. I think of it almost as a controlled neurosis, which is a quality I've noticed in many highly successful entrepreneurs.
Donald Trump
#59. I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.
Luke Rhinehart
#60. Had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples.
Anne Fortier
#61. People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.
Terence McKenna
#62. Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.
Martin Amis
#63. The dark net is a world of power and freedom: of expression, of creativity, of information, of ideas. Power and freedom endow our creative and our destructive faculties. The dark net magnifies both, making it easier to explore every desire, to act on every dark impulse, to indulge every neurosis.
Jamie Bartlett
#65. Every patient clings to fantasies in which he sees himself in the active role so as to escape the pain of being defenseless and helpless. To achieve this he will accept guilt feelings, although they bind him to neurosis.
Alice Miller
#66. I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it.
Sigmund Freud
#67. The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.
William Styron
#68. I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.
Anais Nin
#69. So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.
Philip Kitcher
#70. Religious creeds encourage some of the craziest kinds of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and favor severe manifestations of neurosis, borderline personality states, and sometimes even psychosis.
Albert Ellis
#71. Neurosis is the rule, not the exception', and grasping this can help us to see that we are not alone. It is also the starting point for understanding what went wrong and learning that we have a choice: we can simply re-enact the past, or we can rewrite the script.
Oliver James
#72. The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis.
Erich Fromm
#74. I have to admit, I'm not patriotic. It has partly to do with principle, but it is also a phobia/neurosis.
Rabih Alameddine
#76. Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.
C. G. Jung
#77. Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
W. H. Auden
#79. We can actually put the essence of neurosis in a single word: blaming - or damning.
Albert Ellis
#80. In theory I rather admire the Spaniards for not sharing our Northern time-neurosis; but unfortunately I share it myself.
George Orwell
#81. 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
#82. I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.
Tom Robbins
#84. Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.
Tom Robbins
#85. There's a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they're mismatched. That's all it is. It's not complicated, it's not a neurosis. It's a mix-up. It's a birth defect, like a cleft palate.
Chaz Bono
#86. The search for safety takes its clearest form ... in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis ... to frantically order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear.
Abraham Maslow
#87. Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.
Sigmund Freud
#88. [T]he accumulation of things not spelled out, not properly articulated, may result in neurosis.
Joseph Brodsky
#89. A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping.
Kenneth Tynan
#90. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective. So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle everyday? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything anther than galloping neurosis?
Hunter S. Thompson
#91. [ ... ]as Sylvester says, a man who has never been afflicted with a neurosis does not know the meaning of suffering.
Henry Miller
#92. It is said that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. It may well be that a war neurosis stirred up by propaganda of fear and hatred is the prelude to destruction.
John Boyd Orr
#93. In any discussion of religion and personality integration the question is not whether religion itself makes for health or neurosis, but what kind of religion and how is it used? Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not.
Rollo May
#94. 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
#95. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material.
Pema Chodron
#96. Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods.
Rollo May
#97. Is not our chief neurosis - by which I mean our estrangement from nature - our desire to hold fast to what is forever transforming, to freeze the familiar, to submit motion to stasis, to solicit immortality through rigidity.
James Hollis
#98. Now if only I could do something about my neurosis that forces me to narrate my life out loud for everyone to hear, I said, to no one in particular.
Iain S. Thomas
#99. We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.
Sigmund Freud
#100. Whining about your own, others', or the world's failings is a main element in what we usually call neurosis.
Albert Ellis
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