Adam Phillips Quotations

Transgression is a quest for solitude

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

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

You write to find out what you believe.

The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality - to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting - but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail. It is as if to say: if these are not valued - if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing - are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.

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

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

To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.

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

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