Neurosis Quotes

Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity. (Sigmund Freud)
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. View quote
Carl Jung
I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match. View quote
Arthur Miller
A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you're keeping. View quote
Kenneth Tynan
Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being. View quote
Paul Tillich
Everything but happiness is neurosis. View quote
Anaïs Nin
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality. View quote
Sigmund Freud
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Religion [is] the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process. View quote
Lionel Trilling
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else. (Lawrence Durrell)
Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one. View quote
Anatole France
We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in the factory and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the meaningless life that issues forth at the other end. View quote
Lewis Mumford
Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions. View quote
Thomas Szasz
The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers. View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. View quote
William Styron
Haller's sickness of 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 those who are strongest in spirit and richest in gifts. View quote
Hermann Hesse
A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior. View quote
David Brin
Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis. View quote
Carl Jung
A good mother remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer. She remembers to make play dates, her children's clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games. (Ayelet Waldman)
Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution. View quote
Erich Fromm
Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction. View quote
Marion Woodman
Education, like neurosis, begins at home. View quote
Milton Sapirstein
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions, by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis. View quote
Sigmund Freud