Top 40 Adam Phillips Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Adam Phillips

2. “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.”

— Adam Phillips

3. “The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.”

— Adam Phillips

4. “The past influences everything and dictates nothing.”

— Adam Phillips

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

— Adam Phillips

6. “Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.”

— Adam Phillips

7. “We don’t have relationships to get our needs met, we have relationships to discover what our needs might be.”

— Adam Phillips

8. “And reality matters because it is the only thing that can satisfy us.”

— Adam Phillips

9. “Writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as young children are what ultimately give us our life force as adults. Without this first madness, without being able to sustain this emotional lifeline to our childhoods – to our most passionate selves – our lives can being to feel futile.”

— Adam Phillips

10. “Satisfaction is no more the solution to frustration than certainty is the solution to skepticism.”

— Adam Phillips

11. “To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.”

— Adam Phillips

12. “We make ourselves out of the demands others make of us, and out of whatever else we can use.”

— Adam Phillips

13. “Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.”

— Adam Phillips

14. “Winnicott once referred to depression as the ‘fog over the battlefield’.”

— Adam Phillips

15. “It is difficult to enjoy people for whom we have waited too long. And in this familiar situation, which evokes such intensities of feeling, we wait and we try to do something other than waiting, and we often get bored – the boredom of protest that is always a screen for rage.”

— Adam Phillips

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

— Adam Phillips

17. “Before you have children, the novelist Fay Weldon once said, you can believe you are a nice person: after you have children you understand how wars start.”

— Adam Phillips

18. “A story is told of Alfred Adler, one of Freud’s early followers, who once interviewed a prospective patient at great length, taking a detailed family history, and getting as elaborate an account as possible of what the man was suffering from. At the end of this three-hour consultation Adler apparently said to the man, ‘What would you do if you were cured?’ The man answered him, and Adler said, ‘Well, go and do it then.’ That was the treatment.”

— Adam Phillips

19. “Transgression is a quest for solitude.”

— Adam Phillips

20. “You write to find out what you believe.”

— Adam Phillips

21. “So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction. Three frustrations, three disturbances, and two disillusionments. It is, what has been called in a different context, a cumulative trauma; the cumulative trauma of desire. And this is when it works.”

— Adam Phillips

22. “It is unrealistic to assume that if all goes well in a child’s life, he or she will be happy. Happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children suffer in a way that adults don’t always realize under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy.”

— Adam Phillips

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

— Adam Phillips

24. “We need, in other words, to know something about what we don’t get, and about the importance of not getting it.”

— Adam Phillips

25. “Everything depends on what we would rather do than change.”

— Adam Phillips

26. “You can’t have a desire without an inspiring sense of lack. What we do to our frustration to make it bearable – evade it, void it, misrecognize it, displace it, hide it, project it, deny it, idealize it, and so on – takes the sting out of its tail.”

— Adam Phillips

27. “The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.”

— Adam Phillips

28. “When God is dead, kindness is permitted. When God is dead, kindness is all that people have.”

— Adam Phillips

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

— Adam Phillips

30. “Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring.”

— Adam Phillips

31. “In Freud’s story our possibilities for satisfaction depend upon our capacity for frustration; if we can’t let ourselves feel our frustration – and, surprisingly, this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do – we can’t get a sense of what it is we might be wanting, and missing, of what might really give us pleasure.”

— Adam Phillips

32. “We have the magic of art that we may not perish of the truth.”

— Adam Phillips

33. “Morality born of intimidation is immoral.”

— Adam Phillips

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

— Adam Phillips

35. “Indeed psychoanalysis makes sense only as part of the larger cultural conversation in the arts that became known as modernism. Vienna, where Freud lived for virtually his entire life, was the eye of the storm of this modernism; and was the birthplace of the linguistic philosophy that came to dominate the twentieth century.”

— Adam Phillips

36. “The sign that something does matter to us is that we lose our steadiness.”

— Adam Phillips

37. “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.”

— Adam Phillips

38. “We can only be really realistic after we have tried our optimism out.”

— Adam Phillips

39. “It is, of course, Wilde’s point that socialism interferes with sociability.”

— Adam Phillips

40. “Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it.”

— Adam Phillips

41. “In shame there is a loss of interest in the external world, and a loss of interest in what is or may be good about the self. Shame is the ethnic cleansing of the self.”

— Adam Phillips