Top 40 Philippa Perry Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A sense of achievement improves general confidence and self-esteem.”

— Philippa Perry

2. “Two brains are better than one. You’ve twice the brain capacity and you have two sets of experiences and genes to bring to any challenge.”

— Philippa Perry

3. “Neurogenesis continues throughout life and we have the capacity to establish new neural pathways and strengthen existing ones.”

— Philippa Perry

4. “I am talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers.”

— Philippa Perry

5. “The extreme of flexibility is chaos and the extreme of being structured is rigid and staying sane, or indeed using your creativity, is about being aware of these extremes and steering yourself to areas where you work best which usually tend to be more in the middle than at either extreme edge.”

— Philippa Perry

6. “Our emotional map is laid down mainly in relationship with our earliest caregiver in the first couple of years of life.”

— Philippa Perry

7. “Ruptures – those times when we misunderstand each other, when we make wrong assumptions, when we hurt someone – are inevitable in every important intimate and familial relationship. It is not the rupture that is so important, it is the repair that matters.”

— Philippa Perry

8. “Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain and represents evolution’s invention to enable the nervous system to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.”

— Philippa Perry

9. “Meditation is focused attention and the more we practise focusing our brains the more connections we build up.”

— Philippa Perry

10. “The trouble is if we take no new steps to try a new challenge, our comfort zone doesn’t seem just to stay still, but retract.”

— Philippa Perry

11. “The core of parenting is the relationship you have with your child. If people were plants, the relationship would be the soil. The relationship supports, nurtures, allows growth – or inhibits it. Without a relationship they can lean on, a child’s sense of their security is compromised. You want the relationship to be a source of strength for your child – and, one day, for their children too.”

— Philippa Perry

12. “Our brains do not have to be fixed, they can be plastic.”

— Philippa Perry

13. “Remember: when there is a problem, do not just concentrate on the child and do not think the problem just lies with them. Look at your relationship and what’s happening between you. That’s where you’ll find your answer.”

— Philippa Perry

14. “So much of what we have inherited sits just outside of our awareness. That makes it hard sometimes to know whether we are reacting in the here and now to our child’s behavior or whether our responses are more rooted in our past.”

— Philippa Perry

15. “How we feel about ourselves and how much responsibility we take for how we react to our children are key aspects of parenting that are too often overlooked because it’s much easier to focus instead on our children and their behaviors rather than examining how they affect us and then how we in turn affect them. And it is not only how we respond to children that shapes their personality traits and character but also what they witness and feel in their environment. I.”

— Philippa Perry

16. “If being authoritarian is your go-to way of being with your children, you are also risking their future relationship with authority. It may block them from being able to cooperate with authority or being able to be a leader themselves, or you may breed a dictator.”

— Philippa Perry

17. “Encourage them to draw how they feel or say how they feel and then accept those feelings.”

— Philippa Perry

18. “Beginning a new habit, or ending an old one can feel like letting go of a rope that swings a mile above the ground. So we feel reluctant to let go, after all, we’ve survived so far doing what we’ve done, why risk it.”

— Philippa Perry

19. “A relapse doesn’t mean you’ll never walk down the path you prefer. But I think relapses are almost an inevitable part of any course of self-development.”

— Philippa Perry

20. “Change happens, if it needs to, when we become aware of what we are, not when we try to become what we are not. I.”

— Philippa Perry

21. “After a stroke we can re-learn how to talk, because by practicing we can establish different pathways in the brain, circumnavigating the damaged part.”

— Philippa Perry

22. “Whether you plan or whether you flow in order to be creative probably isn’t the point. The point is to keep practicing to maintain neural pathways and to establish new ones by learning new skills.”

— Philippa Perry

23. “If we keep practicing mental skills it is likely we can strengthen neural connections and make new connections.”

— Philippa Perry

24. “In order to stretch ourselves we do need to experience the vulnerability of not knowing the outcome.”

— Philippa Perry

25. “If someone is depressed they tend to retreat within the inner circle of their comfort zone which in the longer term, may contribute to exacerbating a problem rather than soothing it and if not seeking to expand the comfort zone becomes the norm.”

— Philippa Perry

26. “If I do not keep on testing my limits, my comfort-zone shrinks back. Challenges that had seemed comfortable one year took courage to achieve the next. I do not want to get into that position again, so onwards and outwards.”

— Philippa Perry

27. “Sometimes an artist’s vision may get blurred when subjected to a committee because an artwork is usually an expression of something unconscious that is better left in the realm of one person’s unconscious if it is to speak to another person’s unconscious.”

— Philippa Perry

28. “If we think of our brains as a map, those early roads are like grooves, tram tracks, easy to fall into.”

— Philippa Perry

29. “People tend to slip up and go along the old road before they realise what they’ve done and climb out of it again.”

— Philippa Perry

30. “I think there is probably something evolutionary in that we are drawn to the easiest option. But in our age of convenience, cars, ready meals and off the peg mean that we are in danger of being mentally under stretched.”

— Philippa Perry

31. “It seems whether we have a tendency towards being flexible or structured affects how we create, how we parent, how we work.”

— Philippa Perry

32. “We don’t have to have suffered brain damage to take advantage of the plastic nature of our brains.”

— Philippa Perry

33. “When we had to survive on our wits, gather and kill our food from scratch and be more at the mercy of our environment than we are today, we probably had enough challenge to keep our brains healthy.”

— Philippa Perry

34. “It used to be thought that you stopped making new neural connections in your youth and from then on your brain was fixed and it was downhill all the way. But in fact as we know from our own experience we can keep on learning and learning means changing our brain on a physical level.”

— Philippa Perry

35. “If feelings are left out of it, both sides can get more and more heated as they play what I call “fact tennis,” lobbing reasons over the net to each other, finding more and more to hit the other person with. In this style of arguing, the aim of the conflict becomes to win points rather than find a workable solution. Finding out about differences and working through them is about understanding and compromise, not about winning.”

— Philippa Perry

36. “There are probably times where the creative process is not helped by collaboration.”

— Philippa Perry

37. “If you start from a position of I’m a no-hoper, in a paradoxical kind of way you are not risking being vulnerable.”

— Philippa Perry

38. “Being kind does not mean you don’t share your feelings when you are angry. What it does mean is explaining how you feel and why but without blaming or insulting the other person.”

— Philippa Perry

39. “When psychotherapy began, it was about the practitioner listening to a patient and interpreting what the patient said, in order to afford the patient insights about his or her psyche. But now we understand that the main curative part of psychotherapy is the relationship itself. It appears not to be relevant which psychology school the practitioner belongs to. What matters is the quality of the relationship and the practitioner’s belief in what he or she is offering.”

— Philippa Perry

40. “Does your ‘good behaviour’ go deep or is it merely manners? Are you pleasant on the surface, but do you then condemn people behind their backs?”

— Philippa Perry

41. “This is what learning does. It gives us more things to think about so we have less time to get bored, depressed and under-stimulated. It builds on our existing knowledge and expands it. IT leads us to make more connections by linking together more neural pathways. It also connects our brains to other people’s brains.”

— Philippa Perry