Norman O. Brown Quotes

• “Meaning is not in things but in between them.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “The human body is not a thing or a substance, given, but a continuous creation.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “There is no breakthrough without breakage"--Love's Body”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “I've been impressed by the extent to which one gets sentenced by one's own sentences. One explores certain things in play and then in a strange way they become commitments which one has to live. I have gained a deep respect for the demonic power of the word. Words are not idle. They have consequences.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “The real deceivers are the literalists, who say, I cannot tell a lie.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “Jokes and folklore and poetic metaphor, the wisdom of folly, tell the secret truth.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “The human ego must face the Dionysian reality, and therefore a great work of self-transformation lies ahead of it. For Nietzsche was right in saying that the Apollonian preserves, the Dionysian destroys, self-consciousness.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “To be alive is to be burning”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “The whole nature of the “dialectical” or “poetical” imagination is another problem urgently needing examination; and there is a particular need for psychoanalysis, as part of the psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis, to become conscious of the dialectical, poetical, mystical stream that runs in its blood.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “Dreams are certainly an activity of the mind struggling to circumvent the formal-logical law of contradiction.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way to pay the price for saying or seeing things.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “Compare Nietzsche’s doctrine of the necessary connection between suffering and art: “What must this people have suffered, that they might become thus beautiful.” 6”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “The human libido is essentially narcissistic, but it seeks a world to love as it loves itself.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “The alternative to dualism is dialectics: that is to say, love”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “The opposite of war, the true war, is poetry”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “Thus prolonged infancy shapes human desires in two contradictory directions: on the one hand, on the subjective side, toward omnipotent indulgence in pleasure freed from the limitations of reality; on the other hand, on the objective side, toward powerless dependence on other people. The two tendencies come into conflict because the early experience of freedom and absorption in pleasure must succumb to the recognition of the reality-principle, in a capitulation enforced by parental authority under the threat of loss of parental love”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “Here, and everywhere, psychoanalysis must take the paradoxical position that the Child is Father to the Man; that Primal Father was once a boy, and, if there is anything to psychoanalysis, owes his disposition to his boyhood.”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “Our repressed desires are the desires we had, unrepressed, in childhood; and they are sexual desires”

  Norman O. Brown

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• “We can begin, I think, to make sense of these paradoxes if we think of the Oedipal project as the causa sui (father-of-oneself) project, and therefore in essence a revolt against death generally, and specifically against the biological principle separating mother and child.”

  Norman O. Brown

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