Saskia Kalb > Saskia's Quotes

“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”
― Marcel Proust

“I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“After 50 years of television, there’s no other conclusion the aliens could draw, but that most humans are neurotic, death-hungry, dysfunctional idiots.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole

“Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No

“All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people, it has been my way of coping, because I become so incredibly close to others in my thoughts and feelings of course, they only have to look away dismissively for a storm to break inside me.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
― Pablo Picasso

“...for in that city [New York] there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Never respond to an angry person with a fiery comeback, even if he deserves it...Don't allow his anger to become your anger.”
― Bohdi Sanders, Warrior Wisdom: Ageless Wisdom for the Modern Warrior

“Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.”
― Eckhart Tolle