Adam Phillips Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
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It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
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We should always be aspiring to know more, and to better ourselves, and to improve ourselves. To improve ourselves, because that's how we improve the world around us, by working within us.
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We got ourselves into a position to win the game and we let ourselves down again. It's not good enough.
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I understand why there would be prohibitions on straying from monogamy because of the harm that it does not only to the person who is betrayed, but also to the person who is betraying. "Betray" is a sort of shorthand for what happens.
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It is art, and art only, that reveals us to ourselves.
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When I did the first edit of Les plages, it was very dry and very square in a way. I was just saying the minimum. I said, Well, if this is the minimum, I don't make it. So I tried to make it more refined. I tried to find images, allegorical images, that I could use to express things that I didn't want to say or didn't want to show or I was not able to find how to show.
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There's only one of us here: What we give to others, we give to ourselves. What we withhold from others, we withhold from ourselves. In any moment, when we choose fear instead of love, we deny ourselves the experience of Paradise.
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If we never take a risk, we'll never know the parts of ourselves that would have emerged if we had.
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Monogamy is contrary to nature but necessary for the greater social good.
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Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was ourselves.
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If only we could love ourselves enough to dare to approach God, what constructive dreams he would give us! What noble possibilities God wants to reveal to us - possibilities that would offer stimulation plus real security in service. But we feel too unworthy. So one layer of negative behavior is laid upon another until we emerge as rebellious sinners. But our rebellion is a reaction, not our nature. By nature we are fearful, not bad.
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To move the world we must move ourselves.
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We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order.
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Monogamy is the true path to happiness.
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Always admired men who had many women. It must be that to a child of a dissatisfied woman the idea of monogamy is hollow.
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I thought I was gonna be in the minimum-wage working world all my life.
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Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
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We don't have to guess what Mitt Romney would have done if he were president. Because he told us. He said we should let foreclosures - and I quote - 'hit the bottom' so the market could - I quote - 'run its course.'
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Right when 'High School Musical' was taking off, one of my little cousins called and was really excited to tell me there was a huge 'I Hate Zac Efron' club at her school. I'm sure they're doing great. More power to them.
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The shape that poems make in the mind is an echo of something powerful in the cosmos. I do believe that, and that is certainly irrational, so perhaps I am no wiser than Elizabeth Perkins as to the nature of poetry.
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Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
