Neurosis Quotes - Page 7

• That's the one thing I have over any twenty-one-year-old: a proud history of accumulated neuroses. That's the game in which I'm da man.

  Ray Romano

  Men, Years, Games

  Ray Romano (1999). “Everything and a Kite”

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• Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn't, he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere-much more Calvinistic, more neurotic - it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis.

  Sebastian Horsley

  Oscars, Stuff, Narcissism

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in the air which made one think - made me think for many years - that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.

  Christopher Hitchens

  New York, Thinking, Air

  Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Hitch 22: A Memoir”, p.195, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• A lot of indigenous cultures are deeply involved in working with ancestor spirits, elemental spirits, and demons. Many of these cultures feel that, if you don't deal properly with ancestor spirits, then they come back and infest the living in the form of things like depression, addictive patterns, and neuroses. We in the modern West completely deny the existence of these spirits or other types of entities. And because we've denied them, we may have opened the gates for them to manipulate us in a lot of ways.

  Daniel Pinchbeck

  Culture, May, Patterns

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Thrown into the atmosphere of action [in 1954], I suddenly understood the kind of neurosis that dominated all my previous work. I had not been able to recognize it before: I was inside. Simone de Beauvoir had guessed these reasons before I did.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Atmosphere, Able, Action

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• The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness.

  Robert Winston

  Believe, People, Our Society

  "The Story of God". Book by Robert Winston, www.theguardian.com. 2005.

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• I swim in a pool of my own neurosis. I carry love, grief deeply, like an Irishman.

  Richard Harris

  Grief, Swim, Pool

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• In Les Mots I explain the origin of my madness, of my neurosis. This analysis may help the young who dream of writing.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Dream, Writing, Analysis

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• The study of dreams may be considered the most trustworthy method of investigating deep mental processes. Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the characteristic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright.

  Sigmund Freud

  Dream, Wake Up, May

  Sigmund Freud (2015). “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, p.7, Courier Corporation

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• When you come, please be so kind as to check your neuroses and psychoses at the gate... Fans and other obnoxious pests would do well to maintain silence.

  Henry Miller

  Psychosis, Silence, Fans

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• Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.

  Henry Miller

  Sports, Suicide, Fashion

  Henry Miller (1961). “The Cosmological Eye”, p.177, New Directions Publishing

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• ...Haller's sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs, a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts.

  Hermann Hesse

  Mean, Soul, Generations

  Hermann Hesse (2013). “Steppenwolf: A Novel”, p.21, Macmillan

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• I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that.

  Terence McKenna

  Use, Unhappiness, Modern

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• People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.

  Terence McKenna

  People, Existential, Plant

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• Religion restricts the play of choice and adaptation, since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner - which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence. At this price, by forcibly fixing them in a state of psychical infantilism and by drawing them into a mass-delusion, religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis. But hardly anything more.

  Sigmund Freud

  Depressing, Real, Play

  Sigmund Freud, Peter (AFT) Gay, Christopher Hitchens (2010). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• In all of our lives, we know some boring people, but we don't want to see them on television. In our families, we have some very odd people who have odd neurosis. All of us are really strange people.

  Jim Piddock

  People, Television, Want

  Source: collider.com

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• Religion: Something comparable to childhood neurosis

  Sigmund Freud

  Childhood

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• Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.

  Martin Amis

  Sound, Noses, Noise

  1995 The Information, pt.3.

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• Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.

  W. H. Auden

  Children, Recipes, Bears

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• I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it.

  Sigmund Freud

  Memories, Thinking, Suffering

  Sigmund Freud (2015). “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, p.7, Courier Corporation

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• I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.

  Anais Nin

  Dream, Reality, World Love

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• Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda. The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.

  Thomas Merton

  Spiritual, Men, Thinking

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• I am absolutely sick unto death of hearing people say - they all say this; it must be Item One on the curriculum in Trend College - "I just hate to talk to a machine!" They say this as though it is a major philosophical position, as opposed to a description of a minor neurosis. My feeling is, if you have a problem like this, you shouldn't go around trumpeting it; you should stay home and practice talking to a machine you can feel comfortable with, such as your Water Pik, until you are ready to assume your place in modern society.

  Dave Barry

  Hate, Philosophical, Humorous

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• The agnostic, the skeptic, is neurotic, but this does not imply a false philosophy; it implies the discovery of facts to which he does not know how to adapt himself. The intellectual who tries to escape from neurosis by escaping from the facts is merely acting on the principle that “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.

  Alan Watts

  Wise, Philosophy, Ignorance

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• You start acting in spite of your neuroses, not because of them.

  Frank Langella

  Acting, Spite

  "Frank Langella - An Actor Matured". Interview with Barbara Isenberg, www.deseretnews.com. June 15, 1993.

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