Illusion & Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety
David Smail
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Much of our waking life is spent in a desperate struggle to persuade others that we are not what we fear ourselves to be, or what they may discover us to be if they see through our pretenses. Most people, most of the time, have a profound and unhappy awareness of the contrast between what they are and what they ought to be.”
“Tinkering, however 'scientifically', with our minds and bodies will never make the world a better place.”
“The less articulate person may have an awareness that 'something is not quite right', but will not be able to make that awareness concrete without having his or her consciousness 'raised' through the provision of finer and more sensitive (linguistic) concepts. (This is one of the ways in which the more educated exercise dominion over the lesser.)”
“The evils of the world hurt us because they impinge upon our embodied existence, and they can be changed only through our embodied intervention in an actual world (not by 'thinking' of them in a different way, or by the 'treatment' of their effects on us through interference either physical or mental-- with the way we perceive them).”
“The 'experts' will not change the world-- they will simply make a satisfactory living helping people to adjust to it; the world will only change when ordinary people realize what is making them unhappy, and do something about it.”
“Many children, however, are in some or many important respects unable to fulfill the expectations of their parents, and carry round with them, so to speak, raw, painful areas of disconfirmation which leave them exposed to sudden attacks of self-doubt and uncertainty, sudden ebbings of self-confidence which may well be experienced as 'symptoms' of anxiety or depression.”
“To stand for something, whether in child-rearing or any other sphere, is of course to risk error; it is also to become conspicuous under the gaze of the Other, to give away one's position and to invite rejection. But it is also the only way through which social evolution can take a truly moral direction; it is the inescapable consequence of recognizing and taking seriously the fact that it is we who make the world, not 'it' or 'them'.”
“To allow yourself to be loved by another is to put yourself totally in his or her power, to hand him or her the means of your destruction, because, by and large, we love one another only as objects.”
“The truth, of course, is that human existence is uncertain and vulnerable, complex and delicate, and human relationships shot through with pain threat as well as joy and comfort.”
“The greatest misuse to which we put love, I believe, is to make it the conditional ground on which people can be rather than the unconditional ground from which they can do: we love people as objects rather than subjects.”
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Book Keywords:
education, unconditional-love, loving, shyness, social-materialist, social-material, sociology, science, activism, risk, inadequacy, love, social, trauma, existence, language, insecurity, linguistics, consciousness, interpersonal, anxiety, psychology, objectification, relationships, depression, psychotherapy, subjectivity, ptsd, morality, experience, dystopia, objectivity, awareness, knowledge, embodiment, self-doubt, uncertainty, power
