Top 40 Norman O. Brown Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.”

— Norman O. Brown

2. “Love without attachment is light.”

— Norman O. Brown

3. “Meaning is not in things but in between them.”

— Norman O. Brown

4. “The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.”

— Norman O. Brown

5. “To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead.”

— Norman O. Brown

6. “In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known – that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.”

— Norman O. Brown

7. “The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by spitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside.”

— Norman O. Brown

8. “The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God’s ape; the money complex is therefore the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.”

— Norman O. Brown

9. “The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost.”

— Norman O. Brown

10. “To be alive is to be burning.”

— Norman O. Brown

11. “All currency is neurotic currency.”

— Norman O. Brown

12. “Dreams are certainly an activity of the mind struggling to circumvent the formal-logical law of contradiction.”

— Norman O. Brown

13. “Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.”

— Norman O. Brown

14. “Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”

— Norman O. Brown

15. “Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.”

— Norman O. Brown

16. “Truth is error burned up.”

— Norman O. Brown

17. “The human ego must face the Dionysian reality, and therefore a great work of self-transformation lies ahead of it. For Nietzsche was right in saying that the Apollonian preserves, the Dionysian destroys, self-consciousness.”

— Norman O. Brown

18. “The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future.”

— Norman O. Brown

19. “Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of ‘progress,’ but only by viewing history as a neurosis.”

— Norman O. Brown

20. “The human body is not a thing or a substance, given, but a continuous creation.”

— Norman O. Brown

21. “Whoever expects to walk peacefully in the world must be money’s guest.”

— Norman O. Brown

22. “The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality.”

— Norman O. Brown

23. “Jokes and folklore and poetic metaphor, the wisdom of folly, tell the secret truth.”

— Norman O. Brown

24. “Compare Nietzsche’s doctrine of the necessary connection between suffering and art: “What must this people have suffered, that they might become thus beautiful.” 6.”

— Norman O. Brown

25. “History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.”

— Norman O. Brown

26. “I’ve been impressed by the extent to which one gets sentenced by one’s own sentences. One explores certain things in play and then in a strange way they become commitments which one has to live. I have gained a deep respect for the demonic power of the word. Words are not idle. They have consequences.”

— Norman O. Brown

27. “The real deceivers are the literalists, who say, I cannot tell a lie.”

— Norman O. Brown

28. “The human libido is essentially narcissistic, but it seeks a world to love as it loves itself.”

— Norman O. Brown

29. “To love is to transform; to be a poet.”

— Norman O. Brown

30. “The alternative to dualism is dialectics: that is to say, love.”

— Norman O. Brown

31. “The opposite of war, the true war, is poetry.”

— Norman O. Brown

32. “To be is to be vulnerable.”

— Norman O. Brown

33. “The whole nature of the “dialectical” or “poetical” imagination is another problem urgently needing examination; and there is a particular need for psychoanalysis, as part of the psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis, to become conscious of the dialectical, poetical, mystical stream that runs in its blood.”

— Norman O. Brown

34. “For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal.”

— Norman O. Brown

35. “Art, by overcoming the inhibition and by activating the playful primary process, which is intrinsically easier and more enjoyable than the procedures of normal responsible thought, on both counts effects a saving in psychic expenditure and provides relief from the pressures of reason.”

— Norman O. Brown

36. “Our repressed desires are the desires we had, unrepressed, in childhood; and they are sexual desires.”

— Norman O. Brown

37. “The function of art – Freud says “wit” – is to help us find our way back to sources of pleasure that have been rendered inaccessible by the capitulation to the reality-principle which we call education or maturity – in other words, to regain the lost laughter of infancy.”

— Norman O. Brown

38. “Parental discipline, religious denunciation of bodily pleasure, and philosophic exaltation of the life of reason have all left man overtly docile, but secretly in his unconscious unconvinced, and therefore neurotic.”

— Norman O. Brown

39. “Here, and everywhere, psychoanalysis must take the paradoxical position that the Child is Father to the Man; that Primal Father was once a boy, and, if there is anything to psychoanalysis, owes his disposition to his boyhood.”

— Norman O. Brown

40. “Involuted Eros and involuted aggression constitute the “autonomous self” or what passes for individuality in the human species.”

— Norman O. Brown