Anthony Storr famous quotes

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Religious #Numbers #Long

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

#Relationship #Real #Needs

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Numbers #People #Belief

Originality implies being bold enough to go beyond accepted norms.
-- Anthony Storr

#Originality #Enough #Accepted

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

#Marriage #Single Life #Tears

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

#Bipolar #Lines #Want

Inspiration cannot be willed, though it can be wooed.
-- Anthony Storr

#Motivational #Inspiration

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Mean #People #Personality

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

#Humanity #Rodents #Members

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

#Book #Writing #Way

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

#Psychopathology

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Fall #Able #Derivatives

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

#Thinking #Mad #Sane

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

#Inspiration #Writing #Mind

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Artist #Order #Pieces

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#World #May #Belief

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Marriage #Expression #Giving

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

#Inspirational #Men #Mad

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

#Men #Creative #May

One man's faith is another man's delusion
-- Anthony Storr

#Men #Delusion

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Writing #Men #Creative

All the world loves a lover, and a lover loves all the world.
-- Anthony Storr

#Love #Life #World

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Sympathy #Tea #Done

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Depression #Men #Odds

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

#Heaven #Glimpse #Spirit

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Emotional #Support #Solitude

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Imagination #Missing #Desire

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Bridges #Creative #Needs

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
-- Anthony Storr

#Order #Adults #Needs

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.
-- Anthony Storr

#Men #Quality #Paradox