What Is Addiction Quotes

#1. What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood.

Alice Miller

#2. What is addiction? Only those that have been kept secret; are addictions. Those that are openly visible cannot be called addiction.

Dada Bhagwan

#3. What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?

Amy Reed

#4. It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.

Gabor Mate

#5. Then, when shame strikes, it is so nasty you have to numb yourself, and what better anesthetic than your addiction? It is the perfect vicious circle.

Edward T. Welch

#6. My bulimia was my addiction. Hurting myself was my addiction ... The music is what saved me. That's the only thing I can trust.

Nicole Scherzinger

#7. Every single one of them with their eyes open and on him, their mouths, too, halfway screaming, halfway begging. Offering themselves to him, because the call was irresistible despite being recognizable. They were moths who know what the light is, know what it will do to them. And come anyway.

Glen Hirshberg

#8. Much of the U.S. Midwest is already running on bitumen. Do we want to extend this addiction? And at what cost? Or should we set other goals and say one to two million barrels of oil a day from the tar sands is all we really need to make the transition?

Andrew Nikiforuk

#9. This is what I think. Addiction is just a way of trying to get at something else. Something bigger. Call it transcendence if you want, but it's a fucked-up way, like a rat in a maze. We all want the same thing. We all have this hole. The thing you want offers relief, but it's a trap.

Tess Callahan

#10. Do not seek solace in alcohol. Alcohol obscures good judgment and leaves you unable to think clearly or understand what God is trying to say to you.

Billy Graham

#11. Addiction has had such an impact on my life and the people I love, and there really is not a lot about it that is funny. So the last thing I wanted was to give the impression that it's all fun and games, and isn't it funny what she gets away with.

Edie Falco

#12. You don't have a choice about being an alcoholic. But you do get to choose what kind of alcoholic you're going to be: the kind who lets his addiction define his life, or the kind whose life is too rich and purposeful to be defined by addiction.

Eric Greitens

#13. What distinguishes art from such undertaker's business is that life's closeness to death is its theme, not its addiction.

W.G. Sebald

#14. One way we could describe the struggle of life would be to say it is a battle between agency and addiction. Agency is our power to choose, and addiction is what happens when we have lost that power and we are controlled by something else.

John Bytheway

#15. What I want is to be needed. What I need is to be indispensable to somebody. Who I need is somebody that will eat up all my free time, my ego, my attention. Somebody addicted to me. A mutual addiction.

Chuck Palahniuk

#16. We are taught to consume. And that's what we do. But if we realized that there really is no reason to consume, that it's just a mind set, that it's just an addiction, then we wouldn't be out there stepping on people's hands climbing the corporate ladder of success.

River Phoenix

#17. If the last to know he's an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected.

Philip K. Dick

#18. A good addiction is a contradiction in terms. Anything people can't give up or must have is not healthy, no matter what the activity.

Jody Dean

#19. When we think we can manage our time, our circumstances, and our relationships without His help and inspiration, we know what unmanageability is.

Toni Sorenson

#20. What my true addiction is is reading. I love to read. If I'd get too loaded, I couldn't remember the sentence I just read.

Linda Ronstadt

#21. Whenever you feel upset, take full responsibility for the emotions that you are experiencing. Get to work as quickly as possible identifying the programming, or the addiction, that is leading you to reject what other people are saying or doing.

Ken Keyes Jr.

#22. When people tell me they will give it a try, I say don't bother, you have already decided to fail. It takes more than a try to quit addictions; it takes a commitment. A commitment is a promise that you stick with, no matter what.

Joel Fuhrman

#23. The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn't believe them about addiction.

William S. Burroughs

#24. The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect.

Esther Dyson

#25. Compassion is the most powerful tool you can have when it comes to healing addictions of any kind. Put simply, what your partner needs most from you is compassion.

Christopher Kennedy Lawford

#26. What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.

Gabor Mate

#27. The inability to stop is the essence of what addiction is, ... my favorite drug was more and all.

Nora Volkow

#28. All addictions have one thing in common - they numb you out to what is happening in the moment.

Barbara De Angelis

#29. What is sex addiction? I asked a doctor and the guys goes, Sex addiction ... People will end up doing something they don't want to do just for sex. Isn't that called a first date, man? If sex was the result of something I wanted to do, there'd be condoms all over my PlayStation.

Dov Davidoff

#30. If you are an approval addict, your behaviour is as easy to control as that of any other junkie. All a manipulator need do is a simple two-step process: Give you what you crave, and then threaten to take it away. Every drug dealer in the world plays this game.

Harriet B. Braiker

#31. The high is what you crave, what you would kill for... and believe me, you will lie to yourself until it's to late to stop.

H. Alazhar

#32. What you see is what you get. The island is imaginative enough. Creativity don't need to be wasted on naming things.

Doug Cooper

#33. Addiction is when you can't get enough of what you don't want any more.

Deepak Chopra

#34. Negative freedom is freedom from - freedom from oppression, whether it's a colonial power or addiction to alcohol oppressing you. You need to be freed from negative freedom. Positive freedom is freedom for, freedom to be. And that's what's routinely ignored today.

Os Guinness

#35. I have what's called an addiction to Ativan, and Xanax. Which is preferable to admitting to an aversion to planes.

Joshua Cohen

#36. Nothing is 'wrong' with me, Dan. What's wrong with you? she said in the same eerily quiet voice, dark eyes fixated on Dan, as she breathed heavily.

Martin Hopkins

#37. The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.

Gabor Mate

#38. I started smoking because I thought it was sexy. Now I smoke because I feel sexy when I'm smoking. Is that what they call addiction?

Chloe Thurlow

#39. At every stage, addiction is driven by one of the most powerful, mysterious, and vital forces of human existence. What drives addiction is longing
a longing not just of brain, belly, or loins but finally of the heart.

Cornelius Plantinga

#40. Imagine this:
Ice is coming to YOUR house.
Can you HEAR it knocking?
Are you ready?
What will YOU do?

Cornelia Connie D. DeDona

#41. What I've learned to do is arrest my addiction - arrest it myself, so I don't get arrested.

Rodney King

#42. What the hell is that?" he asked.
"Magic mushrooms."
"I've always wanted to try those," he exclaimed. "They sound so cute.

Heather O'Neill

#43. So to me, what the drugs and addiction are saying is that I deserve to feel good, I'm allowed to take this because look how I was treated as a child. Our authority figures, particularly our parents are hypnotic. Their words are hypnotic literally to small children because of brain wave patterns.

Bernie Siegel

#44. What is dangerous about tranquillizers is that whatever peace of mind they bring is a packaged peace of mind. Where you buy a pill and buy peace of mind with it, you get conditioned to cheap solutions instead of deep ones.

Max Lerner

#45. This is the kind of thing that makes sense to them; this is a language they know. They know what to do with'disease'. They know how to attach a doctor's medical descriptions to hope.

Amy Reed

#46. I was into pain reduction and mind expansion, but what I've ended up with is pain expansion and mind reduction.

Carrie Fisher

#47. Human entirety can only be what it is when giving up the addiction to others' ends.

Georges Bataille

#48. See what it is you would like to attract into your life. See how you would like your business to go, your relationships to go, and even your body to go in terms of overcoming addictions and dealing with weight and health issues.

Wayne Dyer

#49. To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage Weltscbmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?

P. J. O'Rourke

#50. What is the largest addiction in the world? Looking good and being right!

David W. Earle

#51. It is ethanol that everyone is after when they drink alcoholic beverages. That is what gives us the euphoric feeling, and that is what all vendors of alcoholic drinks are selling.

Chris Prentiss

#52. What they don't tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends. Not everyone gets to have a whole new shiny-but-messy life like I have, and I've never come up with a satisfying explanation for why that is.

Nadia Bolz-Weber

#53. Addictive behavior is kind of the inverse of procrastination: procrastination is about not being able to do what you want to do, addiction about not being able to not do what you don't want to do (drink, use drugs, etc.)

James Surowiecki

#54. Drinking is something people do; it's not what you are. But when it becomes what you are, you need to think about becoming something else.

Tim Cowlishaw

#55. I've had an addiction for a long time to the whole business of maximizing one's potential, what I call human activation. The vehicle for actualizing oneself is choice, options, seeking out the proper choices.

Padgett Powell

#56. Faced with our addiction to oil, what does our leadership say? Get more of it!
Strange when you consider their answer to drug dependence is to cut off the supply.

Bill Maher

#57. Contemplation is an alternative consciousness that refuses to identify with or feed what are only passing shows. It is the absolute opposite of addiction, consumerism or any egoic consciousness.

Richard Rohr

#58. This is the 21st century, we are a highly evolved race, our capabilities are so great compared to what we are doing. We have been lulled into addiction and everything is built around it and you have to break out of it and think outside of the box.

Neil Young

#59. Addiction is pretty simple. It's what happens when peolme don't get what they need, and end up soothing themselves.

Gabor Mate

#60. Being mad at a drug addict for doing what drug addicts do, is like being mad at a shark for doing what sharks do, or being mad at a cockroach for doing what cockroaches do.

Oliver Markus

#61. Strange! that what is enjoyed without pleasure cannot be discontinued without pain!

Hannah More

#62. What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that's toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay.

Moby

#63. When we are forced to endure what we cannot endure, something breaks inside our minds. That broken-mindedness is commonly called trauma.

John A. Macdougall

#64. The addiction isn't your problem - it is what you use to cope with your problem.

Roy Nelson

#65. I think that much of our depression, anxiety, and addiction has to do with what John writes about: the soul's need and longing for transcendence. This need is instinctual and unavoidable.

Mirabai Starr

#66. Now we are all learning what it's like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence ... Our destructive addiction has given us a catastrophic war in the Middle East and - now - Katrina is giving our nation a glimpse of the climate chaos we are bequeathing our children.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

#67. What we call coincidences, accidental and remarkable events occurring at the same time, are actually circumstances and events that have come into your life to serve a purpose is to benefit you.

Chris Prentiss

#68. The abuse of food, alcohol, or drugs is essentially a material response to a need that isn't really physical at its foundation.. What we are looking for is pure joy rather than mere sensation, or even oblivion of sensation. Addiction is unrecognized spiritual craving.

Deepak Chopra