Emotional Plague Quotes

You don't believe that your friend could ever do anything great. You despise yourself in secret, even – no, especially – when you stand on your dignity; and since you despise yourself, you are unable to respect your friend. You can't bring yourself to believe that anyone you have sat at table with, or shared a house with, is capable of great achievement. That is why all great men have been solitary. It is hard to think in your company, little man. One can only think 'about' you, or 'for your benefit', not 'with' you, for you stifle all big, generous ideas. ~ Wilhelm Reich

You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it. ~ Wilhelm Reich

Let me tell you something. A man ain't a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside. ~ Toni Morrison

For twenty-five years I've been speaking and writing in defense of your right to happiness in this world, condemning your inability to take what is your due, to secure what you won in bloody battles on the barricades of Paris and Vienna, in the American Civil War, in the Russian Revolution. Your Paris ended with Petain and Laval, your Vienna with Hitler, your Russia with Stalin, and your America may well end in the rule of the Ku Klux Klan! You've been more successful in winning your freedom than in securing it for yourself and others. This I knew long ago. What I did not understand was why time and again, after fighting your way out of a swamp, you sank into a worse one. Then groping and cautiously looking about me, I gradually found out what has enslaved you: YOUR SLAVE DRIVER IS YOU YOURSELF. No one is to blame for your slavery but you yourself. No one else, I say! ~ Wilhelm Reich

I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

I want you to stop being subhuman and become 'yourself'. 'Yourself,' I say. Not the newspaper you read, not your vicious neighbor's opinion, but 'yourself.' I know, and you don't, what you really are deep down. Deep down, you are what a deer, your God, your poet, or your philosopher is. But you think you're a member of the VFW, your bowling club, or the Ku Klux Klan, and because you think so, you behave as you do. This too was told you long ago, by Heinrich Mann in Germany, by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos in the United States. But you recognized neither Mann nor Sinclair. You recognize only the heavyweight champion and Al Capone. If given your choice between a library and a fight, you'll undoubtedly go to the fight. ~ Wilhelm Reich

I can imagine no greater catastrophe than if I were mistaken, and the theory were correct that what I consider secondary instincts or drives are actually primary instincts! Because in that case the emotional plague would rest upon the support of a natural law while its archenemies, truth and sociality, would be relying upon unfounded ethics. Until now both lies and truth have taken recourse to ethics. But only lies have profited because they were able to appear under the guise of truth. Under these circumstances, egoism, theft, petty selfishness, slander, etc., would be the natural rule. (26.july.1943) ~ Wilhelm Reich

It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously by the truth. There is ground for hope in the fact that among millions of decent, hard-working people there are only a few plague-ridden individuals, who do untold harm by appealing to the dark, dangerous drives of the armored average man and mobilizing him for political murder. There is but one antidote to the average man's predisposition to plague: his own feelings for true life. The life force does not seek power but demands only to play its full and acknowledged part in human affairs. It manifests itself through love, work and knowledge. ~ Wilhelm Reich

What marriage offers - and what fidelity is meant to protect - is the possibility of moments when what we have chosen and what we desire are the same. Such a convergence obviously cannot be continuous. No relationship can continue very long at its highest emotional pitch. But fidelity prepares us for the return of these moments, which give us the highest joy we can know; that of union, communion, atonement (in the root sense of at-one-ment)...
To forsake all others does not mean - because it cannot mean - to ignore or neglect all others, to hide or be hidden from all others, or to desire or love no others. To live in marriage is a responsible way to live in sexuality, as to live in a household is a responsible way to live in the world. One cannot enact or fulfill one's love for womankind or mankind, or even for all the women or men to whom one is attracted. If one is to have the power and delight of one's sexuality, then the generality of instinct must be resolved in a responsible relationship to a particular person. Similarly, one cannot live in the world; that is, one cannot become, in the easy, generalizing sense with which the phrase is commonly used, a "world citizen." There can be no such think as a "global village." No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity. We thus come ~ Wendell Berry

Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague. ~ Honore De Balzac

Having emotional connections to things that don't really exist, like looking at a green ball and really loving that green ball, and being sad whether it's around or not. Stuff like that. I've never done acting at this level before so it was a huge challenge for me. It was a hurdle to overcome just to survive. ~ Shia Labeouf

Most of us have become Ecozombies, desensitized, environmental deadheads. On average, society conditions us to spend over 95% of our time and 99.9% of our thinking disconnected from nature. Nature's extreme absence in our lives leaves us abandoned and wanting. We feel we never have enough. We greedily, destructively, consume and, can't stop. Nature's loss in our psyche produces a hurt, hungering, void within us that bullies us into our dilemmas. ~ Michael J. Cohen

In these pages, we keep returning to one foundational principle: providing the possibility of emotional/relational safety for our people, be they patients, children, partners, friends or strangers.

We are able to make this offer when they are experiencing their own neuroception of safety, not continuously, but as the baseline to which we return after our system has adaptively moved into sympathetic arousal or dorsal withdrawal in response to inner and outer conditions.

When we neuroceive safety, we humans automatically begin to open into vulnerability, and the movement of our "inherent treatment plan" (Sills, 2010) has a greater probability of coming forward.

When we have a neuroception of threat, we adaptively tighten down at many levels, from physical tension to activation of the protective skills we have learned over a lifetime (Levine, 2010). In that state, our innate healing path will often wisely stay hidden until more favorable conditions arrive. ~ Bonnie Badenoch

Potentially the seed has a mighty tree within it. The four aspects of our nature (the physical, the mental, the emotional and the spiritual) are like seeds. They have the potential to grow into powerful gifts. ~ Judie Bopp

It comes to this: like all of us who have not yet died of plague he fully realizes that his freedom and his life may be snatched from him at any moment. ~ Albert Camus

Sexual abusers often convince their victims that the abuse was their own demerit. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Packs a Huge Emotional Punch! Graceful Writing, Great Acting, Exquisite Direction, Suspense, Profound Subject Matter and It Rocks! ~ Rex Reed

Vegetarians, dropping meat, tend to fill up with too much starch. This leaves them no more healthy than meat-eaters, with constipation, indigestion, colds, catarrhs, coughs and chest complaints to plague them. Eating sparingly of breads, cakes, crackers, cookies, macaroni, spaghetti, anything largely starch, is a far step on the road to good health. ~ Helen And Scott Nearing

That's the moment when Tuesday, after all his caution, stopped being just my service dog, and my emotional support, and my conversation piece. That's when he became my friend. ~ Luis Carlos Montalvan

I'm sorry I have the emotional maturity of a grapefruit." He grinned, his fangs glinting. "You don't have the emotional maturity of a grapefruit. A tangerine, maybe, but I think you've got to work your way up to grapefruit. ~ Molly Harper

Transformation is the result of big shifts in perceptions and responses. The process can be uncomfortable, since the mind is reluctant to notice itself, to take responsibility for its stories, and to change. When the mind is in acute resistance, the emotional body pays a price. ~ Miguel Ruiz

Some people balk at saying that "normal" people might actually be in the minority: "How could the psychological world label half or more of us with a diagnosis?!" But so what if the majority of people qualify for a psychological label? Doesn't that seem equally if not more probable than assuming that half of the people in the world are pretty much interchangeable in terms of brain and emotional functioning? ~ M. E. Thomas

EMOTIONAL ABANDONMENT AND NARCISSISTIC DEPRIVATION Children need mirroring and echoing. These come from their primary caregiver's eyes. Mirroring means that someone is there for them and reflects who they really are at any given moment of time. In the first three years of our life each of us needed to be admired and taken seriously. We needed to be accepted for the very one we are. Having these mirroring needs met results in what Alice Miller calls our basic narcissistic supplies. These supplies result from good mirroring by a parent with good boundaries. When this is the case, as Miller states in The Drama of the Gifted Child, the following dynamics take place: 1. The child's aggressive impulses can be neutralized because they do not threaten the parent. 2. The child's striving for autonomy is not experienced as a threat to the parent. ~ John Bradshaw

These are attitudes masquerading as ideas, emotional commitments disguised as intellectual honesty. However sincere the current evangelists of unbelief may be, they are doing nothing more than producing rationales
ballasted by a formidable collection of conceptual and historical errors
for convictions that are rooted not in reason but in a greater cultural will, of which their arguments are only reflexes. ~ David Bentley Hart

Embrace relational uncertainty. It's called romance. Embrace spiritual uncertainty. It's called mystery. Embrace occupational uncertainty. It's called destiny. Embrace emotional uncertainty. It's called joy. Embrace intellectual uncertainty. It's called revelation. ~ Mark Batterson

Ring around the rosie.
A pocket full of posie.
Ashes ashes, we all fall down.
Some people say that this poem is about the Black Death, the fourteenth-century plague that killed 100-million people ...
Sadly, though, most experts think this is nonsense ...
How can I be so sure about this rhyme when all the experts disagree?
Because I ate the kid who made it up. ~ Scott Westerfeld

To me, Hell isn't a place; it's a state of mind. It is a psychological self-imprisonment in which fear is the warden. It is a result of not living in alignment with your goals, dreams, and purpose. It is to find yourself in the endless emotional agony of, What if? ~ Steve Maraboli

For this, deep waters whelm the fruitful lea, Wars ravage, famine wastes, plague withers, nor Shall cease till men have chosen the better part. ~ George MacDonald

Dear Lord, Please protect and guide Eve at her time of recovery. Life has given her a lot of emotional wounds, and now her physical body is mirroring this pain. Please take her hand and keep her safe. Let her live to lead a life that shows her the power of your love."
Together they added, "Amen."
Blake hated that it was all they could do right now. ~ Debra Anastasia

Stone knew more about Death than most. He knew of delusions that could plague the soul at such a time. It was a time of transition, consciousness shifted dimensions and delusions were common. He knew of the nature of reality, the impermanence of perception, and he was not perturbed, at least not completely. This delusion was sweet and genuine and urged him to follow his soul's purpose. ~ Shradhdha. S

I don't actually care what I climb, only how it affects me. Which means the summit doesn't matter as much as the emotional process. ~ Mark Twight

The Republican Party is slightly ahead of Democrats when it come to devaluing any traditional understanding of foreign and national security policy. This is not surprising, because in all other matter of public policy, the GOP has strictly subordinated practical governance and problem solving to the emotional thematics of an endless political campaign. Whether the topic is Iran, Russia, or the proper level of defense spending at a time of high deficits, the GOP's stance has little to do with the merits of the situation; it is a projection of domestic political sloganeering. Taking a position on anything, whcther it be Ukraine or the efficacy of drones, boils down to a talking-point projection of focus groups-tested emotional themes: strength versus weakness, standing tall versus cutting and running, acting versus thinking." pp. 157-158 ~ Mike Lofgren

Positive emotional energy is the key to health, happiness and wellbeing. The more positive you are, the better your life will be in every area. ~ Brian Tracy

A person's affinity towards his or her own religious beliefs, has the same neurological qualities as of his or her emotional affinity towards the romantic partner. In fact the symptoms that follow the early euphoric phase of romantic love are often seen in religious people when their beloved religious faith is challenged. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Detachment is a tricky business. If we are seeking to access the innate wisdom in our emotions, detachment itself cannot be the goal… because in order to hear what our emotions have to say, we have to be willing to feel them. ~ Jessica Moore

When you're in your twenties and you haven't fully realized what you look for in a partner, the single market has about everything you can imagine and more. And you're like a blank canvas - everyone's like a blank canvas - as you discover how to paint a relationship together.

Later in life, when you've experienced love and heartbreak and you find yourself single again and returning to the spouseless market, you kind of figure out that what's left for you…is not a blank canvas for you to write your story on anymore. Every bachelor comes with a previous story, with drama and emotional baggage from their past relationships.

And you - you - have to deal with it all, measure the puzzle pieces and see if somehow they might fit within the gaps and cracks left by your own experiences. ~ Esther Rabbit

I expect that Calvin would evaluate our worship today not as too emotional, but as too narrow in its emotional repertoire. ~ Michael S. Horton

Food like love is a deeply emotional matter. ~ Julia Child

I feel very strongly influenced by long-form box-set TV drama ... I feel really excited that, at last, the novel has found its on-screen equivalent, because the emotional arcs and changes that you can follow are just so much more like a novel, and so many amazing shows recently have done as much as film can do to show the interior world. ~ Eleanor Catton