Top 35 Anthony Storr Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s not psychopathology that counts. It’s what you do with it.”

— Anthony Storr

2. “Originality implies being bold enough to go beyond accepted norms.”

— Anthony Storr

3. “It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness, yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.”

— Anthony Storr

4. “I get intrigued by a puzzle, and writing a book is the best way to solve it.”

— Anthony Storr

5. “It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.”

— Anthony Storr

6. “I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place.”

— Anthony Storr

7. “The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in what he creates.”

— Anthony Storr

8. “So-called “inspiration” is no more than an extreme example of a process which constantly goes on in the minds of all of us.”

— Anthony Storr

9. “The mind must make its own happiness; any troubles can be endured if the sufferer has resources of his own to sustain him.”

— Anthony Storr

10. “Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.”

— Anthony Storr

11. “One man’s faith is another man’s delusion.”

— Anthony Storr

12. “Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius; and the uniformity of a work denotes the hand of a single artist.’ Edward Gibbon.”

— Anthony Storr

13. “In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.”

— Anthony Storr

14. “The human spirit is not indestructible; but a courageous few discover that, when in hell, they are granted a glimpse of heaven.”

— Anthony Storr

15. “The professional must learn to be moved and touched emotionally, yet at the same time stand back objectively: I’ve seen a lot of damage done by tea and sympathy.”

— Anthony Storr

16. “All the world loves a lover, and a lover loves all the world.”

— Anthony Storr

17. “Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as delusional. Belief systems which may be just as irrational but which are shared by millions are called world religions.”

— Anthony Storr

18. “Imagination flourishes best in solitude.”

— Anthony Storr

19. “Some split between the inner world and outer world is common to all behaviour, and the need to bridge the gap is the source of creative behaviour.”

— Anthony Storr

20. “When a man suffers from delusions he is described as mad but when a million do so they belong to a world religion.”

— Anthony Storr

21. “Part of what we admire about a painting or a piece of music is the order which the artist has imposed upon what would otherwise have appeared disconnected or chaotic.”

— Anthony Storr

22. “It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that have led to man’s extraordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy him.”

— Anthony Storr

23. “The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in the universe through what he creates. He finds this a valuable integrating process which, like meditation or prayer, has little to do with other people, but which has its own separate validity. His most significant moments are those in which he attains some new insight, or makes some new discovery; and these moments are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which he is alone.”

— Anthony Storr

24. “The sane are madder than we think, the mad saner.”

— Anthony Storr

25. “If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears.”

— Anthony Storr

26. “The capacity to form attachments on equal terms is considered evidence of emotional maturity. It is the absence of this capacity which is pathological. Whether there may be other criteria of emotional maturity, like the capacity to be alone, is seldom taken into account.”

— Anthony Storr

27. “It may be our idealization of interpersonal relationships in the West that causes marriage, supposedly the most intimate tie, to be so unstable. If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears.”

— Anthony Storr

28. “I once had a conversation with the director of a monastery. “Everyone who comes to us,” he said, “does so for the wrong reasons.” The same is generally true of people who become psychotherapists. It is sometimes possible to persuade people to be come psychotherapists who have not chosen the profession for their own personal reasons; but, for the most part, we have to put up with what we get; namely, ourselves.”

— Anthony Storr

29. “With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species.”

— Anthony Storr

30. “The creative consequences of man’s imaginative strivings may never make him whole; but they constitute his deepest consolations and his greatest glories.”

— Anthony Storr

31. “Inspiration cannot be willed, though it can be wooed.”

— Anthony Storr

32. “When a person is receiving very little information, what he does receive makes a more powerful impression; a fact well appreciated by totalitarian regimes which control the Press.”

— Anthony Storr

33. “Since I was not able wholly to subscribe to any one set of beliefs advanced by any ‘guru’ I had to fall back on my own, however derivative.”

— Anthony Storr

34. “On the other hand, less rigorous conditions of imprisonment have sometimes proved fruitful. Being cut off from the distractions of ordinary life encourages the prisoner with creative potential to call upon the resources of his imagination. As we shall see, a variety of authors have begun writing in prison, where this has been allowed; or have passed through periods of spiritual and mental turmoil which have later found expression in their works.”

— Anthony Storr

35. “But observers have generally noted that such people are greatly absorbed with their own thoughts even when in company. Winnicott’s paradoxical description of ’being alone in the presence of others may be relevant not only to the infant with its mother, but also to those who are capable of intense concentration and preoccupation with their own inner processes even when surrounded by other people.”

— Anthony Storr

36. “But Freud, perhaps because he himself denies ever having had such an experience, treats it as illusory; whilst those who describe ecstatic feelings of unity usually portray them as more intensely real than any other feelings which they can recall.”

— Anthony Storr

37. “With few exceptions, psychotherapists have omitted to consider the fact that the capacity to be alone is also an aspect of emotional maturity.”

— Anthony Storr

38. “The hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.”

— Anthony Storr