R. D. Laing Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of R. D. Laing's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Psychiatrist R. D. Laing's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 120 quotes on this page collected since October 7, 1927! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • If I don't know I don't know, I think I know. If I don't know I know I know, I think I don't know.

  • The way out is through the door you came in.

  • They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

    RD Laing (2012). “Selected Works of RD Laing: Knots”, p.5, Routledge
  • We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.

  • The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.

  • Few books today are forgivable. Black on canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible.

    R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”
  • The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man.

    R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”
  • Man as seen as an organism or man as seen as a person discloses different aspects of the human reality to the investigator. Both are quite possible methodologically but one must be alert to the possible occasion for confusion. (...) Seen as an organism, man cannot be anything else but a complex of things, of its, and the processes that ultimately comprise an organism are it-processes.

  • What do you do when you don't know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession.

  • We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.

    Spiritual   Self   Mad  
    R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”
  • The fountain has not played itself out, the Flame still shines, the River still flows, the Spring still bubbles forth, the Light has not faded. But between us and It, there is a veil which is more like fifty feet of solid concrete. Deus absconditus. Or we have absconded.

  • The square root of nothing.

    "RD Laing: The Abominable Family Man". The Sunday Times, April 12, 2009.
  • In the society of men the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie.

    R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”
  • The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

    Attributed in: "Educating Christians" by Jack Lee Seymour, Margaret Ann Crain, Joseph V. Crockett, (p. 53), 1993.
  • Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".

    R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”
  • If you have passion for what you do, the company you keep, the life you live, it will be reflected in whatever you create. Passion is like that; it springs out, jumps, unpredictable and unplanned, into everything we touch. If it doesn't, others know. Passion can't be faked and it can't be manufactured. Which is why it is so priceless.

  • How do we define, how do we describe, how do we explain and/or understand ourselves? What sort of creatures do we take ourselves to be? What are we? Who are we? Why are we? How do we come to be what or who we are or take ourselves to be? How do we give an account of ourselves? How do we account for ourselves, our actions, interactions, transactions (praxis), our biologic processes? Our specific human existence?

  • Do not adjust your mind, the fault is in reality.

  • If I hazard a guess as to the most endemic, prevalent anxiety among human beings-including fear of death, abandonment, loneliness-nothing is more prevalent than the fear of one another.

  • I'm ridiculous to feel ridiculous when I'm not.

    R. D. Laing (2008). “Knots”, p.68, Marbot Ediciones
  • Doctors have throughout time made fortunes on killing their patients with their cures. The difference in psychiatry is that it is the death of the soul.

  • Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.

  • We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

    R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”
  • Our civilization represses not only "the instincts", not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence. Among one-dimensional men, it is not surprising that someone with an insistent experience of other dimensions, that he cannot entirely deny or forget, will run the risk either of being destroyed by the others, or of betraying what he knows.

  • True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.

    Self  
  • Truth is literally that which is without secrecy, what discloses itself without a veil.

  • We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. I am a specialist, God help me, in events in inner space and time, in experiences called thoughts, images, reveries, dreams, visions, hallucinations, dreams of memories, memories of dreams, memories of visions, dreams of hallucinations, refractions of refractions of refractions of that original Alpha and Omega of experience and reality, that Reality on whose repression, denial, splitting, projection, falsification, and general desecration and profanation our civilisation as much as anything is based.

    R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”
  • We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.

    R.D Laing (1967). “The Politics of Experience”
  • The dynamics and structures found in those groups called families in our society may not be evident in those groups called families in other places and times.

  • The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveler with his patient.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 120 quotes from the Psychiatrist R. D. Laing, starting from October 7, 1927! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!