Neurotic Quotes - Page 14

• Neurotic identity crises come when our defense mechanisms have been too successful and we're encapsulated in the fortress we have constructed with nothing to refresh us in our solitary confinement. So we play the old movies with their stale fears and their unrealistic hopes until we become bored enough to risk disarmament and engagement.

  Sam Keen

  Successful, Play, Bored

  Sam Keen (1980). “What to do when you're bored and blue”

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• Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices.

  Richard Bach

  Funny, Beautiful, Wise

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• Know that the most neurotic, most ugly situation is simply testing you. It is testing capacity, beyond his control, your flexibility, your adjustment and your character.

  Harbhajan Singh Yogi

  Inspirational, Character, Ugly

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• An artist has been defined as a neurotic who continually cures himeself with his art

  Lee Simonson

  Art, Cures, Has Beens

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• ...The more a person is inclined to gratitude, the less likely he or she is to be depressed, anxious, lonely, envious, or neurotic.

  Sonja Lyubomirsky

  Lonely, Gratitude, Envious

  Sonja Lyubomirsky (2007). “The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want”, p.81, Penguin

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• Take stock of your thoughts and behavior. Each night ask yourself, when were you negative when you could have been positive? When did you withhold love when you might have given it? When did you play a neurotic game instead of behaving in a powerful way? Use this process to self-correct.

  Marianne Williamson

  Powerful, Night, Self

  "10 Ways to Stay Spiritually Connected" by Marianne Williamson, www.oprah.com. May 2010.

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• Neurotic means he is not as sensible as I am, and psychotic means he's even worse than my brother-in-law.

  Karl A. Menninger

  Brother, Mean, Law

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• The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination, consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing, and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day.

  Robert De Niro

  Crush, Good Day, Writing

  "Girls and OCD" by Tara Fass and Lisa Jonsson, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 12, 2014.

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• A woman has got to be able to say, and not feel guilty,
  'Who am I, and what do I want out of life?' She mustn't
  feel selfish and neurotic if she wants goals of her own,
  outside of husband and children.

  Betty Friedan

  Children, Husband, Selfish

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• The man who accepts Western values absolutely, finds his creative faculties becoming so warped and stunted that he is almost completely dependent on external satisfactions, and the moment he becomes frustrated in his search for these, he begins to develop neurotic symptoms, to feel that life is not worth living, and, in chronic cases, to take his own life.

  Paul Robeson

  Men, Western Values, Creative

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• For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality.

  Nathaniel Branden

  Reality, Men, Healthy

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• Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me, neither option is worth pursuing.

  John Shelby Spong

  Religious, Jesus, Memories

  John Shelby Spong (2009). “Jesus for the Non-Religious”, p.9, Harper Collins

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• I think that is why we stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull- because when people have seen you at your worst, you don’t have to put on the mask as much.

  Anne Lamott

  Thinking, People, Dull

  Anne Lamott (2000). “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith”, p.190, Anchor

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• The most paradoxical aspect of neurotic shame is that it is the core motivator of the superachieved and the underachieved, the star and the scapegoat, the righteous and the wretched, the powerful and the pathetic.

  John Bradshaw

  Stars, Powerful, Shame

  John Bradshaw (2010). “Healing the Shame that Binds You”, p.34, Health Communications, Inc.

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• As a kid, I imagined lots of different scenarios for my life. I would be an astronaut. Maybe a cartoonist. A famous explorer or rock star. Never once did I see myself standing under the window of a house belonging to some druggie named Carbine, waiting for his yard gnome to steal his stash so I could get a cab back to a cheap motel where my friend, a neurotic, death-obsessed dwarf, was waiting for me so we could get on the road to an undefined place and a mysterious Dr. X, who would cure me of mad cow disease and stop a band of dark energy from destroying the universe.

  Libba Bray

  Stars, Kids, Dark

  Libba Bray (2009). “Going Bovine”, p.257, Delacorte Books for Young Readers

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• An artist, in my experience, is a man or woman of unusual talent and peculiar, highly individual sensibility, with an independent and probably contrary mind, driven by mysterious passions for which another word is neurosis. In getting from point A to point B, the neurotic goes via point Q. It's in that roundabout that people are either completely crippled and hopeless in life, or highly creative.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Passion, Independent, Artist

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• You must overcome any shyness and have a conversation with the librarian, because he can offer you reliable advice that will save you much time. You must consider that the librarian (if not overworked or neurotic) is happy when he can demonstrate two things: the quality of his memory and erudition and the richness of his library, especially if it is small. The more isolated and disregarded the library, the more the librarian is consumed with sorrow for its underestimation. A person who asks for help makes the librarian happy.

  Umberto Eco

  Memories, Two, Advice

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• Thanksgiving. It proved you had survived another year with its wars, inflation, unemployment, smog, presidents. It was a grand neurotic gathering of clans: loud drunks, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, screaming children, would-be suicides. And don't forget indigestion. I wasn't different from anyone else: There sat the 18-pound bird on my sink, dead, plucked, totally disemboweled. Iris would roast it for me.

  Charles Bukowski

  Thanksgiving, Suicide, Children

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• The content dictates the style all the time. That's the way it is. If the content of the film - as in Husbands and Wives - is highly jagged, neurotic, fast-paced, nervous New York film, it just called for that kind of shooting, editing and performance.

  Woody Allen

  Editing, Style, Shooting

  Interview with Geoff Andrew, www.theguardian.com. September 27, 2001.

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• I had taken the photograph from afar (distance being the basic glitch in our relationship), using my Nikon and zoom lens while hiding behind a fake marble pillar. I was hiding because if he knew I'd been secretly photographing him for all these months he would think I was immature, neurotic and obsessive. I'm not. I'm an artist. Artists are always misunderstood.(Thwonk)

  Joan Bauer

  Distance, Taken, Artist

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• But the cinephile is … a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.

  Francois Truffaut

  Book, Love Life, Opposites

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• Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions.

  Erich Fromm

  Passion, Thinking, Two

  Erich Fromm (2011). “The Revolution of Hope”, p.51, Lantern Books

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• Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

  Terence McKenna

  Ego, Mind Blowing, Culture

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• Healing the self means committing ourselves to a wholehearted willingness to be what and how we are-beings frail and fragile, strong and passionate, neurotic and balanced, diseased and whole, partial and complete, stingy and generous, twisted and straight, storm-tossed and quiescent, bound and free.

  Paula Gunn Allen

  Strong, Healing, Mean

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• I just hope I don't become so blissful I become boring. I think I'll always be neurotic enough to do something weird.

  Kurt Cobain

  Thinking, Truthful, Boring

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