Anthony Storr Quotes

It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.

It's not psychopathology that counts. It's what you do with it.

Originality implies being bold enough to go beyond accepted norms.

With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species.

If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears.

What chiefly concerns and alarms many of us are the problems arising from religious fanaticism. As long as large numbers of militant enthusiasts are persuaded that they alone have access to the truth, and that the rest of us are infidels, we remain under threat. Lord Acton's famous phrase about power can be used of another danger. Dogma tends to corrupt, and absolute dogma corrupts absolutely.

It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological.

Whether a belief is considered to be a delusion or not depends partly upon the intensity with which it is defended, and partly upon the numbers of people subscribing to it.

I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place.

The human spirit is not indestructible; but a courageous few discover that, when in hell, they are granted a glimpse of heaven.

In a culture in which interpersonal relationships are generally considered to provide the answer to every form of distress, it is sometimes difficult to persuade well-meaning helpers that solitude can be as therapeutic as emotional support.

The professional must learn to be moved and touched emotionally, yet at the same time stand back objectively: I've seen a lot of damage done by tea and sympathy.

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in what he creates.

The sane are madder than we think, the mad saner.

I get intrigued by a puzzle, and writing a book is the best way to solve it.

Imagination flourishes best in solitude.

Had [Winston Churchill] been a stable and equable man, he could never have inspired the nation. In 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, a leader of sober judgment might well have concluded that we were finished.

Idiosyncratic belief systems which are shared by only a few adherents are likely to be regarded as delusional. Belief systems which may be just as irrational but which are shared by millions are called world religions.

Avoidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioral disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships

Since I was not able wholly to subscribe to any one set of beliefs advanced by any 'guru' I had to fall back on my own, however derivative.

Inspiration cannot be willed, though it can be wooed.

Part of what we admire about a painting or a piece of music is the order which the artist has imposed upon what would otherwise have appeared disconnected or chaotic.

The word "jealousy" is often used as if it were synonymous with envy; but I think the distinction worth preserving. Jealousy is predominantly concerned with the fear of loss of something one possesses, envy with the wish to own something another possesses. Othello suffers from the fear that he has lost Desdemona's love. Iago suffers from envy of the position held by Cassio, to which he feels entitled.

The creative consequences of man's imaginative strivings may never make him whole; but they constitute his deepest consolations and his greatest glories.

One man's faith is another man's delusion

The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of ‘adaptation through maladaptation’ which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.

A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationship -- a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is: a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression; in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.

It is widely believed that interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness, yet the lives of creative individuals often seem to run counter to this assumption.

Some split between the inner world and outer world is common to all behaviour, and the need to bridge the gap is the source of creative behaviour.

It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that have led to man's extraordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy him.

All the world loves a lover, and a lover loves all the world.

So-called "inspiration" is no more than an extreme example of a process which constantly goes on in the minds of all of us.

When a man suffers from delusions he is described as mad but when a million do so they belong to a world religion

If creative work protects a man against mental illness, it is small wonder that he pursues it with avidity; and even if the state of mind he is seeking to avoid is no more than a mild state of depression or apathy, this still constitutes a cogent reason for engaging in creative work even when it brings no obvious external benefit in its train.