Top 100 R D Laing Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. What an interesting finger
let me suck it.
It's not an interesting finger
take it away.
R.D. Laing
#4. We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
R.D. Laing
#5. The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.
R.D. Laing
#6. Any experience of reality is indescribable!
R.D. Laing
#7. A psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls, but who keeps people asleep, treats them for waking up, and drugs them asleep again (increasingly effectively as this field of technology sharpens its weapons), helps to drive them crazy.
R.D. Laing
#8. Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
R.D. Laing
#9. What we think is less than what we know; What we know is less than what we love; What we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.
R.D. Laing
#10. In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.
R.D. Laing
#11. There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia', but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
R.D. Laing
#12. Attempts to wake before our time are often punished, especially by those who love us most. Because they, bless them, are asleep. They think anyone who wakes up, or who, still asleep, realizes that what is taken to be real is a 'dream' is going crazy.
R.D. Laing
#13. This last possibility [of developing psychosis] is aways present if the individual begins to identify himself too exclusively with that part of him which feels unembodied.
R.D. Laing
#14. A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.
R.D. Laing
#15. 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
#16. Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.
R.D. Laing
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Insanity
a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
R.D. Laing
#22. 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
#23. The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.
R.D. Laing
#24. Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
R.D. Laing
#25. Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
R.D. Laing
#26. No one acts or experiences in a vacuum ...
R.D. Laing
#27. If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.
R.D. Laing
#28. Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.
R.D. Laing
#29. When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.
R.D. Laing
#30. We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
R.D. Laing
#31. From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not "true" sanity. Their madness is not "true" madness. The madness of our patients is an artifact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves.
R.D. Laing
#32. Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.
R.D. Laing
#33. They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game
R.D. Laing
#34. The dynamics and structures found in those groups called families in our society may not be evident in those groups called families in other places and times.
R.D. Laing
#35. We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.
R.D. Laing
#36. Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.
R.D. Laing
#37. Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God himself is mad.
R.D. Laing
#38. Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.
R.D. Laing
#39. Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
R.D. Laing
#40. The girl was not specifically religious; [...] yet although her faith was nameless her way of living was somehow an affirmation of life rather than a negation of it.
R.D. Laing
#41. Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?
R.D. Laing
#42. Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature ... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book.
R.D. Laing
#43. We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which 'our' world will die with us although 'the' world will go on without us.
R.D. Laing
#44. If I do not know that I do not know, I think I know.
If I do not know that I know, I think I do not know.
R.D. Laing
#45. Moral beauty, so Gerard Manley Hopkins said, is dangerous. If such individuals could take his advice to meet it, then let it alone, things would be easier. But it is just which they can not do.
R.D. Laing
#46. Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.
R.D. Laing
#47. Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is.
R.D. Laing
#48. In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.
R.D. Laing
#49. Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.
R.D. Laing
#50. I am quite sure that a good number of "cures" of psychotics consist in the fact that the patient has decided, for one reason or other, once more to play at being sane.
R.D. Laing
#51. The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
R.D. Laing
#52. 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
#54. No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.
R.D. Laing
#55. There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.
R.D. Laing
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.
R.D. Laing
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not.
R.D. Laing
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
R.D. Laing
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. If the blind must lead the blind, it is as well
that the leader knows he is.
R.D. Laing
#74. 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
#75. The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.
R.D. Laing
#76. 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
#77. Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.
R.D. Laing
#78. Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.
R.D. Laing
#79. No one has the answer: we are answer and question.
R.D. Laing
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.
R.D. Laing
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.
R.D. Laing
#89. One cannot say everything at once.
R.D. Laing
#90. Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.
R.D. Laing
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
R.D. Laing
#94. We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
R.D. Laing
#95. 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
#96. Life is a sexually trasmitted disese.
R.D. Laing
#97. 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
#98. Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.
R.D. Laing
#99. The way out is through the door you came in.
R.D. Laing
#100. Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.
R.D. Laing
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