R. D. Laing
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.Collection: History
The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.Collection: Experience
We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.Collection: Society
Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.Collection: Death
Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.Collection: Imagination
Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.Collection: Life
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.Collection: Change
Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia', but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know, I think I don't know.
Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.
True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone.
Rule A: Don't. Rule A1: Rule A doesn't exist. Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or non-existence of Rules A, A1 or A2.
Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.Collection: Reality
The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.Collection: Children
Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.Collection: Lying
We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.Collection: Love
They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.Collection: Games
Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.Collection: Pain
If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that; it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless.Collection: Spring
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.Collection: Change
A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.Collection: Children
What we call "normal" is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive actions on experience...It is radically estranged from the structure of being.Collection: Depression
True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.Collection: Reality
Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.Collection: Insanity
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.Collection: Spiritual
Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?Collection: Serious
I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.Collection: Men
Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.Collection: Enlightenment
A psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls, but who keeps people asleep, treats them for waking up, and drugs them asleep again (increasingly effectively as this field of technology sharpens its weapons), helps to drive them crazy.Collection: Crazy
What we think is less than what we know; What we know is less than what we love; What we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are.Collection: Love Is
To mystify, in the active sense, is to befuddle, cloud, obscure, mask whatever is going on, whether this be experience, action, or process, or whatever is "the issue." It induces confusion in the sense that there is failure to see what is "really" being experienced, or being done, or going on, and failure to distinguish or discriminate the actual issues. This entails the substitution of false for true constructions of what is being experienced, being done (praxis), or going on (process), and the substitution of false issues for the actual issues.Collection: Clouds
Our capacity to think, except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interest and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited: our capacity even to see, hear, touch, taste and smell is so shrouded in veils of mystification that an intensive discipline of unlearning is necessary for anyone before one can begin to experience the world afresh, with innocence, truth and love.Collection: Thinking
Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.Collection: Philosophy
Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.Collection: Children
The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.Collection: Yesterday
The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality',than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixedCollection: Reality
Before one goes through the gate one may not be aware there is a gate One may think there is a gate to go through and look a long time for it without finding it One may find it and it may not open If it opens one may be through it As one goes through it one sees that the gate one went through was the self that went through it no one went through a gate there was no gate to go through no one ever found a gate no one ever realized there was never a gateCollection: Thinking
When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.Collection: Children
I am quite sure that a good number of "cures" of psychotics consist in the fact that the patient has decided, for one reason or other, once more to play at being sane.Collection: Play
When I go beyond a certain range it's outside of my direct horizon therefore I've got to rely on the writings and personal communications given to me by other people that I know.... I've got to try to piece together some tentative information picture of what the whole thing is like, but I'm aware that it becomes more and more speculative as it becomes more and more second, third, fourth hand. And this applies to absolutely everyone.Collection: Communication
A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.Collection: May