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Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity. -- Sigmund Freud
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. -- Carl Jung
Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being. -- Paul Tillich
National isolation breeds national neurosis. -- Hubert H. Humphrey
Education, like neurosis, begins at home. -- Milton Sapirstein
The only thing to know is how to use your neurosis. -- Arthur Adamov
Work and love; these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis. -- Theodor Reik
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis. -- William Styron
Sin, guilt, neurosis; they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge. -- Henry Miller
A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist. -- Sigmund Freud
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else. -- Lawrence Durrell
Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one. -- Anatole France
Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient -- Marcel Proust
It is said that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. It may well be that a war neurosis stirred up by propaganda of fear and hatred is the prelude to destruction. -- John Boyd Orr
Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process. -- Lionel Trilling
Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions. -- Thomas Szasz
Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization. -- Tom Robbins
Neurosis is just a high-class word for whining. -- Albert Ellis
Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance. -- Carl Jung
Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself. -- Carl Jung
Neurosis is the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning. -- Carl Jung
Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution. -- Erich Fromm
Neurosis is no worse than a bad cold; you ache all over, and it's made you a mess, but you won't die from it. -- Mignon McLaughlin
I've done it with all my films. I always keep an eye on the first time I show it because... I don't know. Neurosis. -- Ti West
But the center can be a harmful place for one who has lived so long on the edge.... Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization. -- Tom Robbins
Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and the external world. -- Sigmund Freud
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis. -- Sigmund Freud
My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis -- Anish Kapoor
My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis. -- Anish Kapoor
Even in my first analysis of a depressive psychosis, I was immediately struck by its structural similarity with obsessional neurosis. -- Karl Abraham
To me, acting is the most logical way for people's neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves. -- James Dean
I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two. -- Sam Taylor-Wood
Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure. -- Joseph Heller
We have long observed that every neurosis has the result, and therefore probably the purpose, of forcing the patient out of real life, of alienating him from actuality. -- Sigmund Freud
And I think for me there's a lot of neurosis involved with where you should be or thinking about where you are all the time instead of being where you are. -- Liev Schreiber
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads. -- William Styron
Between the ages of 24 and 27, I read Freud's complete works, everything that had been translated into English. It was very stimulating intellectually. But I did not accept his view of neurosis or of human nature. -- Nathaniel Branden
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The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness. -- Robert Winston
I like people with big talents and small neuroses - not always an easy combination to find. I've discovered that if the neurosis is too big, it diminishes the talent and you wind up working too hard for what you get. -- Mel Brooks
Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn't - he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere - much more Calvinistic, more neurotic - it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis. -- Sebastian Horsley
With the world as it now presents itself, there is something perverse, and probably dysfunctional, about a person who stays in the same house for 40 years. What about the expanding family syndrome, the school-lottery migration, the property portfolio neurosis? Have you no imagination? -- Iain Sinclair
I was always admiring people who seemed to conduct themselves with ease in the world. Maybe that's a great gift to give your kids if you can do that. Because they can move through the world without neurosis, this anxiety about everything, which our own parents gave us. -- Peter Capaldi
There's a gender in your brain and a gender in your body. For 99 percent of people, those things are in alignment. For transgender people, they're mismatched. That's all it is. It's not complicated, it's not a neurosis. It's a mix-up. It's a birth defect, like a cleft palate. -- Chaz Bono
The expectation that every neurotic phenomenon can be cured may, I suspect, be derived from the layman's belief that the neuroses are something quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist. Whereas in fact they are severe, constitutionally fixed illnesses, which rarely restrict themselves to only a few attacks but persist as a rule over long periods throughout life. -- Sigmund Freud
Everything but happiness is neurosis. -- Anais Nin
The more neurosis the more wisdom. -- Pema Chodron
Sanity is permanent, neurosis is temporary. -- Chogyam Trungpa
Religion: Something comparable to childhood neurosis -- Sigmund Freud
Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis. -- Vincent Van Gogh
Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis. -- Sigmund Freud
Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis. -- Thomas Merton
Religion [is] the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity -- Sigmund Freud
The difference between neurosis and wisdom is struggle. -- Natalie Goldberg
Boredom is the only sure cure for neurosis. -- Mason Cooley
Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis. -- Sigmund Freud
A neurosis is wherever we are allied against our true nature. -- James Hollis
If you can't handle your neurosis, your neurosis will handle you. -- Chuck Spezzano
Happiness is your original nature, it is YOU, minus your neurosis -- Robert Holden
The characteristic of every neurosis is to represent itself as natural. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping. -- Kenneth Tynan
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Fear, anxiety and neurosis: that's just in the suitcase when you're an actor. -- Laura Linney
A neurosis defends itself by coming up with rationalizations to explain away bizarre behavior. -- David Brin
Especially in times of collective neurosis, the existence of . . . mature people is of crucial importance. -- Marie-Louise von Franz
Any inhibition must be wrong, since inevitably in the end it causes neurosis and insanity. -- D. H. Lawrence
People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting. -- Terence McKenna
Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear. -- W. H. Auden
Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose. -- Martin Amis
Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis. -- Norman O. Brown
We can actually put the essence of neurosis in a single word: blaming - or damning. -- Albert Ellis
I swim in a pool of my own neurosis. I carry love, grief deeply, like an Irishman. -- Richard Harris
Creativity is neither the product of neurosis nor simple talent, but an intense courageous encounter with the Gods. -- Rollo May
For in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy. -- Evelyn Waugh
Whining about your own, others', or the world's failings is a main element in what we usually call neurosis. -- Albert Ellis
I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis. -- Tom Robbins
Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Meditation is to get out of your psychosis and to get out of your neurosis; it is simply to slip out of them. -- Rajneesh
In Les Mots I explain the origin of my madness, of my neurosis. This analysis may help the young who dream of writing. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
The scars left from the child's defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis. -- Erich Fromm
Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom. -- Pema Chodron
The edge in modern painting is charged with neurosis; it meets a world that no longer confirms it but which is hostile or at best indifferent. -- Andrew Graham-Dixon
Religious creeds encourage some of the craziest kinds of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and favor severe manifestations of neurosis, borderline personality states, and sometimes even psychosis. -- Albert Ellis
Modern neurosis began with the discoveries of Copernicus. Science made men feel small by showing him that the earth was not the center of the universe. -- Mary McCarthy
There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time. -- Anais Nin
For forty years I was conscripted by the absolute, the neurosis. The absolute is gone. There remain countless tasks among which literature is in no way privileged. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
In all of our society, but especially in Hollywood, there is an obsession with perfection that can lead to self-loathing and neurosis and all that kind of stuff. -- Ethan Hawke
I started learning to sing what I liked, to experience it in a visceral way. Then it's inside. Get rid of the neurosis and then you can improvise. -- Joe Satriani
I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn't for that. -- Terence McKenna
I'm always asked if the songs that I write are therapeutic, and my answer is a quick no. In fact, it could be argued that they exacerbate my neurosis. -- Loudon Wainwright III
We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system. -- Sigmund Freud
The search for safety takes its clearest form... in the compulsive-obsessive neurosis... to frantically order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear. -- Abraham Maslow
One of the keys to thinking big is total focus. I think of it almost as a controlled neurosis, which is a quality I've noticed in many highly successful entrepreneurs. -- Donald Trump
New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue "the real thing. -- Umberto Eco
New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue "the real thing." -- Umberto Eco
The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis. -- Sigmund Freud
And I think for me theres a lot of neurosis involved with where you should be or thinking about where you are all the time instead of being where you are. -- Liev Schreiber
I don't think you always get to see a woman on TV who is relatively neurosis-free and, while looking for a relationship, isn't man hunting and isn't cloying and isn't a fashionista. -- Jordana Spiro
I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis. -- Luke Rhinehart
We have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort. -- Terence McKenna
...had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. -- Anne Fortier
What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world. -- Sigmund Freud
It could be ventured to understand obsessive compulsive neurosis as the pathological counterpart of religious development, to define neurosis as an individual religiosity; to define religion as a universal obsessive compulsive neurosis. -- Sigmund Freud
About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times. -- Carl Jung
I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it. -- Sigmund Freud
This transmissibility of taboo is a reflection of the tendency, on which we have already remarked, for the unconscious instinct in the neurosis to shift constantly along associative paths on to new objects. -- Sigmund Freud
Meditation practice is a way of making friends with ourselves. Whether we are worthy or unworthy, that's not the point. It's developing a friendly attitude to ourselves, accepting the hidden neurosis coming through. -- Chogyam Trungpa
I had realized in the meantime that action too has its difficulties, and that one can also be led to it by neurosis. We are not saved by politics any more than by literature. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
This is, i think, very much the Age of Anxiety, the age of the neurosis, because along with so much that weighs on our minds there is perhaps even more that grates on our nerves. -- Louis Kronenberger
Water creates a neurosis in golfers. The very thought of this harmless fluid robs them of their normal powers of rational thought, turns their legs to jelly, and produces a palsy of the upper limbs. -- Peter Dobereiner
I used to think romantic love was a neurosis shared by two, a supreme foolishness. I no longer think that. There's nothing foolish in loving anyone. Thinking you'll be loved in return is what's foolish. -- Rita Mae Brown

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