Gabor Mate Quotes

• We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.

  Gabor Mate

  Responsibility, Our World, Mind

  Gabor Mate, M.D. (2009). “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction”, p.396, Knopf Canada

  122 Copy quote

• The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise.

  Gabor Mate

  Hurt, Pain, Emotional

  91 Copy quote

• Not why the addiction, but why the pain.

  Gabor Mate

  Pain, Recovery, Addiction

  80 Copy quote

• A hurt is at the center of all addictive behaviors. . . . The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain

  Gabor Mate

  Hurt, Stress, Addiction

  99 Copy quote

• 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

  Addiction, Drug, Relief

  Gabor Mate, M.D. (2009). “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction”, p.33, Knopf Canada

  67 Copy quote

• The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates.

  Gabor Mate

  Passion, Flames, Differences

  83 Copy quote

• Medical thinking usually sees stress as highly disturbing but isolated events such as, for example, sudden unemployment, a marriage breakup, or the death of a loved one. These major events are potent sources of stress for many, but there are chronic daily stresses in people's lives that are more insidious and more harmful in their long-term biological consequences. Internally generated stresses take their toll without in any way seeming out of the ordinary.

  Gabor Mate

  Breakup, Pain, Stress

  68 Copy quote

• In the real world there is no nature vs. nurture argument, only an infinitely complex and moment-by-moment interaction between genetic and environmental effects

  Gabor Mate

  Real, Environmental, World

  63 Copy quote

• Autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything.

  Gabor Mate

  Long, Impossible, Driven

  40 Copy quote

• A long-term substance abuser, a few months before his death, penned this poem: Went downtown, Hastings and Main, looking for relief from the pain. All I did was find a ticket on a one-way train. ... Give me peace before I die. The track is laid out so well; we all live our private hell; just more tickets on the hell-bound train.

  Gabor Mate

  Pain, Long, Track

  57 Copy quote

• ... While nervous tension may be a component of stress, one can be stressed without feeling tension.

  Gabor Mate

  Pain, Stress, Feelings

  32 Copy quote

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