R.D. Laing quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by R.D. Laing

R.D. Laing Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from R.D. Laing on Wise Famous Quotes.

Any experience of reality is indescribable!

If the blind must lead the blind, it is as well
that the leader knows he is.

Where can you scream? It's a serious question: where can you go in society and scream?

Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.

Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

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.

No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.

We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.

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.

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.

The human mind has to ask "Who, what, whence, whither, why am I?" And it is very doubtful if the human mind can answer any of these questions.

One cannot say everything at once.

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.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.

Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

Life is a sexually trasmitted disese.

What an interesting finger
let me suck it.
It's not an interesting finger
take it away.

No one has the answer: we are answer and question.

Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.

Few books today are forgivable.

A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon.

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.

Our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities.

In our society many of the old rituals have lost much of their power. New ones have not arisen.

The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.

The square root of nothing.

Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia', but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

Psychological breakdowns are actually breakthroughs to enlightenment.

The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.

To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can never be as disillusioning.

When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.

Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.

Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.

A mental healer may be a psychiatrist. A psychiatrist may or may not be a mental healer.

No one acts or experiences in a vacuum ...

Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.

Experience is mad when it steps beyond the horizons of our common, that is, our communal sense.

In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal.

Being embodied as such is no insurance against feelings of hopelessness or meaningslessness. Beyond his body, he still has to know who he is.

The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always.

Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.

Beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie.

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.

There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.

The way out is through the door you came in.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God himself is mad.

We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.

If we can revert to the truth, then a great deal of one's suffering can be erased, because a great deal of one's suffering is based on sheer lies.

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

Insanity is a perfectly natural adjustment to a totally unnatural and negative environment.

I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not.

Insanity
a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

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.

If I do not know that I do not know, I think I know.
If I do not know that I know, I think I do not know.

The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.

Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.