Defence Mechanism Quotes

Going to religious places gives me clarity. When I am sitting there, I am in a state of gratitude with my defence mechanism down and am open to receiving that energy, that gives me clarity as at that time, you are listening to your heart. The heart shows you the direction in life. The mind exists only to execute your emotion. ~ Arjun Rampal

Her jaundiced eyes became yellower when she realized she's been a victim of (mis)information. She couldn't go back. Some defence mechanism. ~ Rahul Tushar

When I was thirteen years old, I didn't exactly discover epic fantasy on my own. I acquired it as a social defence mechanism. ~ Tansy Rayner Roberts

This arrogance thing ... I've had that my whole life. I flip between, 'Oh really? Oh, thank you. Wow. That's amazing' and, 'Yeah! Of course I am.' They're both varying degrees of a self-defence mechanism. It can be from minute to minute that I change. ~ James Corden

People use irony as a defense mechanism. ~ David Byrne

every psychic defence mechanism known to the modern psychologist makes its appearance somewhere in Shakespeare. ~ Theodore Dalrymple

The addict's reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making; the internal shutdown of vulnerability. Vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens our ability to function. The automatic repression of painful emotion is a helpful child's prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. ~ Gabor Mate

It has been known, for forty years now, that the difference between a noble, upright man and a maniacal degenerate can be pinpointed at the sight of a few clumps of white matter in the brain, and that the movement of the lancet in the supraorbital area of the brain, if it damages those clumps , can transform a splendid soul into a loathsome creature. Yet what and enormous portion of anthropology - not to mention the philosophy of man - refuses to take cognizance of this circumstance! But I am no exception here; whether scientist or laymen, we agree finally that our bodies detoriate with age - but the mind?! We would like to see it different from any earthly mechanism subject to defect. We crave an ideal - even one carrying a minus sign, even one shameful, sinful, so as it delivers us from an explanation worse than the Satanic: that what is taking place is a certain play of forces perfectly indifferent to man. ~ Stanislaw Lem

Hungary is, in a word, in a state of WAR against the Hapsburg dynasty, a war of legitimate defence, by which alone it can ever regain independence and freedom. ~ Lajos Kossuth

FRIAR LAURENCE: Hold thy desperate hand:
Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art:
Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote
The unreasonable fury of a beast:
Unseemly woman in a seeming man!
Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both!
Thou hast amazed me: by my holy order,
I thought thy disposition better temper'd.
Hast thou slain Tybalt? wilt thou slay thyself?
And stay thy lady too that lives in thee,
By doing damned hate upon thyself?
Why rail'st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth?
Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet
In thee at once; which thou at once wouldst lose.
Fie, fie, thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit;
Which, like a usurer, abound'st in all,
And usest none in that true use indeed
Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit:
Thy noble shape is but a form of wax,
Digressing from the valour of a man;
Thy dear love sworn but hollow perjury,
Killing that love which thou hast vow'd to cherish;
Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love,
Misshapen in the conduct of them both,
Like powder in a skitless soldier's flask,
Is set afire by thine own ignorance,
And thou dismember'd with thine own defence.
What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead;
There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slew'st Tybalt; there are thou happy too:
William Shakespeare

The Federal Reserve, the Treasury, all the regulator agencies - if there's a problem of the financial mechanism in society, the only one to fix it is government. They've got a legitimate role. ~ Dick Cheney

You will have to go deep into man. From where comes this violence? From where comes this exploitation? From where come all these ego-trips? From where? They all come from unconsciousness. Man lives asleep, man lives mechanically. That mechanism has to be broken, man has to be re-done. That is the religious revolution that has not been tried. ~ Rajneesh

He said that the great offensives of the future would be psychological, and he thought the Governments should get busy about it and prepare their defence... He considered that the most deadly weapon in the world was the power of mass-persuasion. ~ John Buchan

There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous [founding nations upon superstition]; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history... [T]he detail of the formation of the American governments... may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven... it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses... Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind.

[A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, 1787] ~ John Adams

There is one thing that destroys anyone's ability to advance spiritually: the inability to control the mind and emotions. In order to free the mechanism for spiritual growth, this control is the first step in beginning a spiritual life. ~ Rudrananda

The tendency of philosophers who know nothing of machinery is to talk of man as a mere mechanism, intending by this to imply that he is without purpose. This shows a lack of understanding of machines as well as of man. ~ Arthur Young

It didn't take long to write up our reports, since they mostly consisted of variations on "Rapunzel confirmed downtown, field team dispatched to resolve the incursion; incursion resolved when Agent Winters shouted at it until it agreed to go away. Resolution mechanism not recommended for future incursions." Demi's was even shorter: "Barely made it out of the car. ~ Seanan McGuire

It is far more than the discovery of life without a self. The immediate, inevitable result is an emergence into a new dimension of knowing and being that entails a difficult and prolonged readjustment. the reflexive mechanism of the mind -or whatever it is that allows us to be self-conscious - is cut off or permanently suspended so the mind is ever after held in a fixed now moment out of which it cannot move in its uninterrupted gaze upon the Unknown ~ Bernadette Roberts

Thus her reply with accent sweet renewd. If this be our condition, thus to dwell In narrow circuit strait'nd by a Foe, Suttle or violent, we not endu'd Single with like defence, wherever met, How are we happie, still in fear of harm? ~ John Milton

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

I have a lot of friends who are trying to clean up their act, or that are still making trouble for themselves, so I'm definitely well-versed on what goes on in the mind and the heart of a person who self-destructs as their coping mechanism, and also what they're like when you take their preferred substance away. ~ Natasha Lyonne

If the Commander-in-Chief will look beyond the defence forces, he will discover that the real India is not military but peace-loving. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

In the animal world, there are all kinds of behaviors that are binary: for example, to flee or to fight. In any evolutionary environment, knowing your opponent's decision would not be advantageous for long because your opponent would evolve the same recognition mechanism to also know you. ~ Chris Adami

That's the tragedy of creatures," I agreed. Mine too, if it comes to that. "We spend so long looking for our 'soulmates' or becoming 'one with our higher self'. But all this time the one true love has already happened. We don't remember because there was no mechanism to form a memory in the before-time, but we are its product."
(Mordred) ~ Aldous Mercer

In principle, if you understood the mechanisms of keeping things repaired, you could keep things going indefinitely. ~ Cynthia Kenyon

Untruth being unacceptable to the mind of man, there is no other defence left for absurdity but obscurity. ~ John Locke

I don't like smiley pictures. A smile is a defense mechanism. It says, You can't have the real me but here's my smile. You get closer to the real person when they stop smiling. ~ Chris Killip

The scenery of mountains painted on the ever-changing azure canvas of the sky, the mysterious mechanism of the human body, the rose, the green grass carpet, the magnanimity of souls, the loftiness of minds, the depth of love - all these things remind us of a God who is beautiful and noble. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Climate change: Never before in history have human beings been called on to act collectively in defence of the Earth ~ Desmond Tutu

A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart. ~ Lewis Thomas

Memory and Habit are attributes of the Time cancer. They control the most simple Proustian episode, and an understanding of their mechanism must precede any particular analysis of their application. ~ Samuel Beckett

In Pakistan lies our deliverance, defence and honour ... In our solidarity, unity and discipline lie the strength, power and sanction behind us to carry on this fight successfully. No sacrifice should be considered too great. We shall never accept any future constitution on the basis of a united India. ~ Muhammad Ali Jinnah

no simple mechanism could do the job as well or better. It might simply be that nobody has yet found the simpler alternative. The Ptolemaic system (with the Earth in the center, orbited by the Sun, the Moon, planets, and stars) represented the state of the art in astronomy for over a thousand years, and its predictive accuracy was improved over the centuries by progressively complicating the model: adding epicycles upon epicycles to the postulated celestial motions. Then the entire system was overthrown by the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, which was simpler and - though only after further elaboration by Kepler - more predictively accurate.63 Artificial intelligence methods are now used in more areas than it would make sense to review here, but mentioning a sampling of them will give an idea of the breadth of applications. Aside from the game AIs ~ Nick Bostrom

The first mark of valor is defence. ~ Philip Sidney

It is not much better to fall honourably in defence of liberty, than be again exposed to the outrages of Romans? Such, at least, is my resolution; as for you men, you may, if you please, live and be slaves! ~ QueenBoadicea

And Anne could have said much, and did long to say a little in defence of her friend's not very dissimilar claims to theirs, but her sense of personal respect to her father prevented her. She made no reply. She left it to himself to recollect, that Mrs Smith was not the only widow in Bath between thirty and forty, with little to live on, and no surname of dignity. ~ Jane Austen

The mechanisms of vis medicatrix naturae - the most healing power of nature - are so effective that most diseases are self-terminating. ~ Rene Dubos

Yes, we were amazed when that happened. It was a real joke to us. Konrad Lueg and I did a Happening, and we used the phrase just for the Happening, to have a catchy name for it; and then it immediately got taken up and brought into use. There's no defence against that - and really it's no bad thing. ~ Gerhard Richter

That's what Buddhism has been trying to unravel - the mechanism of happiness and suffering. It is a science of the mind. ~ Matthieu Ricard

A brick could be used as a dream stimulator. Just tap it gently against your forehead. And if the mechanism gets stuck, just slam it down on your skull to jar everything loose. ~ Jarod Kintz

There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti