Rd Laing Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.

R.D. Laing

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. The more you keep trying the closer you are to achieving

Saccheen Laing

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. The square root of nothing.

R.D. Laing

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

R.D. Laing

#21. 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

#22. Physically, Echo Spring is nothing more than a nickname for a liquor cabinet, drawn from the brand of bourbon it contains.

Olivia Laing

#23. 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

#24. They'd even met, he recommended him to his own editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, suggesting Max sign up this promising young

Olivia Laing

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. If the blind must lead the blind, it is as well
that the leader knows he is.

R.D. Laing

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.

R.D. Laing