Neuroticism Quotes

“One must conform to the baseness of an age or become neurotic.”
― Robert Musil

“It is naturally a sign of inner liberation when a patient can squarely recognize his difficulties and take them with a grain of humor. But some patients at the beginning of analysis make incessant jokes about themselves, or exaggerate their difficulties in so dramatic a way that they will appear funny, while they are at the same time absurdly sensitive to any criticism. In these instances humor is used to take the sting out of an otherwise unbearable shame.”
― Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization

“Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“The tenacity with which the neurotic adheres to any attitude is a sure indication that the attitude fulfills functions which seem indispensable in the framework of his neurosis.”
― Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization

“When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so—called hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can’t see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, ’metaphorical’ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.”
― Les Murray, Fredy Neptune

“If neurotic is wanting two mutally exclusive things at once and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutally exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“And Paris! All afternoon in someone's attic
We raised our glasses
And drank to the asses
Who ran the world and turned neurotic.”
― Galway Kinnell

“...this was the hypersensitive behavior of a neurotic...”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“The most important and well-studied depression-prone personality trait is neuroticism. People who score high on neuroticism are prone to anxiety and other negative feelings (think Woody Allen) and have stronger upsets in response to stresses, be it sudden job loss or terrorist attack. There is robust evidence that neurotic temperaments predispose people to experience periods of low mood and periods of more severe, long-lasting depression. A wealth of data indicates that highly neurotic people are like the fabled ant: they worry about bad things that may or may not happen in the future, and they are more vigilant about threats, even those that are distant, hidden, or subtle.”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic