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. One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.

Robert Musil

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Boredom is the only sure cure for neurosis.

Mason Cooley

#14. Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Carl Jung

#15. I feel like schizoid is a precursor to schizophrenia or manic depression. I feel like I'm manic. I have parts of schizoid, parts of Asperger's. I'm a smorgasbord of neuroses.

Jim Shaw

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being

Paul Tillich

#22. Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Religion: Something comparable to childhood neurosis

Sigmund Freud

#26. Education, like neurosis, begins at home.

Milton Sapirstein

#27. 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

#28. We can postulate that there must be diseases founded on a conflict between ego and super-ego. Analysis gives us the right to infer that melancholia is the model of this group, and then we should put in a claim for the name of "narcissistic psychoneuroses" for these disorders.

Sigmund Freud

#29. 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

#30. As every man is hunted by his own daemon, vexed by his own disease, this checks all his activity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#31. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.

Twyla Tharp

#32. 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

#33. A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior.

David Brin

#34. 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

#35. The demands of Sex Privatization contradict the demands of the Beauty Ideal, causing the severe feminine neurosis about personal appearance.

Shulamith Firestone

#36. Well, aren't you just saying it's better to be neurotic, sensitive, and miserable than unimaginative, adjusted and content? Is it really better?

Malcolm Bradbury

#37. 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

#38. A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.

Sigmund Freud

#39. 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

#40. If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Sylvia Plath

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. The wealthy ... live in marble mausoleums surrounded by the suspicions and neuroses that have replaced the medieval moats which once isolated so-called aristocrats from reality.

Elsa Maxwell

#45. Every age has its own collective neurosis, and every age needs its own psychotherapy to cope with it.

Viktor E. Frankl

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. I have enough trouble living with my own neurosis without coping with other people's.

P.D. James

#49. You can't escape history, or the needs and neuroses you've picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth ... Your every past action and thought have made you what you are.

Charles R. Johnson

#50. If you can't handle your neurosis, your neurosis will handle you.

Chuck Spezzano

#51. Even in my first analysis of a depressive psychosis, I was immediately struck by its structural similarity with obsessional neurosis.

Karl Abraham

#52. My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis.

Anish Kapoor

#53. 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

#54. Happiness is your original nature, it is YOU, minus your neurosis

Robert Holden

#55. 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

#56. Sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.

Sigmund Freud

#57. 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

#58. Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.

Sigmund Freud

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. I believe that even the worst people on the planet believe that they are somehow justified in their neurosis.

John Schneider

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.

Sigmund Freud

#69. While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.

Tiffany Madison

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.

Terence McKenna

#74. Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.

Martin Amis

#75. 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

#76. To be modern means to like antique furniture - and youthful neurosis.

Hugo Von Hofmannsthal

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.

Thomas Merton

#86. I have to admit, I'm not patriotic. It has partly to do with principle, but it is also a phobia/neurosis.

Rabih Alameddine

#87. Neurosis is no excuse for bad manners.

Sigmund Freud

#88. Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.

C. G. Jung

#89. Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.

W. H. Auden

#90. The difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle.

Natalie Goldberg

#91. [Judith Warner:] Our neurotic quest to perfect the mechanics of mothering can be interpreted as an effort to do on an individual level what we've stopped trying to do on a society-wide one.

Emily Matchar

#92. Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

Francine Du Plessix Gray

#93. We can actually put the essence of neurosis in a single word: blaming - or damning.

Albert Ellis

#94. In theory I rather admire the Spaniards for not sharing our Northern time-neurosis; but unfortunately I share it myself.

George Orwell

#95. 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

#96. I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

Tom Robbins

#97. Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis.

Vincent Van Gogh

#98. Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization.

Tom Robbins

#99. 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

#100. One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Bertrand Russell