“The neurotic lies awake at night, composing letters to those he hates. He seldom thinks of dropping a line to those he loves.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis
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Mignon McLaughlin 278
American journalist 1913–1983Related quotes
Alfred Brendel (1976), as cited in: Benny Shanon (2013). The Representational and the Presentational. p. 380.
Vol. 2, Ch. 24 "Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt against Reason"
The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)
Context: I do not overlook the fact that there are irrationalists who love mankind, and that not all forms of irrationalism engender criminality. But I hold that he who teaches that not reason but love should rule opens up the way for those who rule by hate. (Socrates, I believe, saw something of this when he suggested that mistrust or hatred of argument is related to mistrust or hatred of man).
Niebla [Mist] (1914)
Context: Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself — that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks — he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech — this thing that they call a social product — was made for lying.
Source: The Reappearance of the Christ (1948), Chapter III: The Reappearance of the Christ, World Expectancy
Source: Between Planets (1951), Chapter 17, “To Reset the Clock” (p. 173)
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29
Context: Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. The Sophists are the enemy.
Now Plato's hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people—there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind's first beginning grasp of the idea of truth. That's what it is all about.
“When you hate someone you used to love, and you think he's done something awful - he probably has.”
Source: The Boyfriend List: 15 Guys, 11 Shrink Appointments, 4 Ceramic Frogs and Me, Ruby Oliver