Quotes by Neel Burton

“The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened.”

“Ultimately, loneliness is not the experience of lacking but the experience of living. It is part and parcel of the human condition, and, unless a person is resolved, it can only be a matter of time...”

“By diverting the Dionysian impulse into special rites on special days, the orgy kept it under control, preventing it from surfacing in more insidious and perfidious ways. More than that, it transfo...”

“Just as Prometheus delivered stolen fire to man, so Eve, and the serpent, delivered man into self-consciousness, setting him up, were it not for his short lifespan, as rival to God. At the same tim...”

“Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By ...”

“In 1949, neurologist Egas Moniz (1874-1955) received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses. Today, prefrontal leucotomy is derided as a barbaric...”

“The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education.”

“You see, people in the depressive position are often stigmatised as failures' or losers'. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. If these people are in the depressive position, it is m...”

“Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.”

“As it stands, the diagnostic criteria for depression are so loose that two people with absolutely no symptoms in common can both end up with the same unitary diagnosis of depression. For this reaso...”

“An artist is someone who, needing nothing and no one, wants everything and everyone.”

“No one ever pays to learn the most important things.”

“Philosophy gives life to life.”

“It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.”

“Maths is at only one remove from magic.”

“In philosophy, phenomenology is the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Wine blind tasting is the best phenomenology, phenomenology par excellence, returning us from our heads ...”

“The notion of dream interpretation far antedates the birth of psychoanalysis, and probably served an important function in most, if not all, historical societies. In having lost this function, mode...”

“Man is mostly a collection of emotions, most of which he would do better not to be feeling.”

“A man is rich not only by what he has, but also, and above all, by what he doesn't.”

“Solitude removes us from the mindless humdrum of everyday life into a higher consciousness which reconnects us with ourselves and our deepest humanity, and also with the natural world, which quicke...”