Adam Phillips Quotes

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

There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.

The past influences everything and dictates nothing.

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.

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.

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

The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.

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

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

Transgression is a quest for solitude

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

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

You write to find out what you believe.

I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?

Like the 'good' characters in literature, the sane don't have any memorable lines.

Falling in love, finding your passion, are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by.

Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities an compelling nostalgias.