Adam Phillips Quotes

The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality – to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting – but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail. It is as if to say: if these are not valued – if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing – are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.

You write to find out what you believe.

There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage

The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access

Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.

To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.

Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.

People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.

The past influences everything and dictates nothing.

Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.

Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.