Pathology Quotes

“One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.”
― Alain de Botton

“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn't matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.”
― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

“The "pathology of normalcy" rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.”
― Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

“You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.”
― Richard Selzer, Letters To A Young Doctor

“There is a noticeable element of the pathological in some current leftist critiques, which I tend to attribute to feelings of guilt allied to feelings of impotence. Not an attractive combination, because it results in self-hatred.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“Sometimes my pathology just spills out into the camera doesn't it?”
― Craig Ferguson

“During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“For Zola, as for Huysmans, nature itself is uncanny because it is the domain of the feminine, a domain that is constitutionally defective, lacking, even pathological.”
― Charles Bernheimer

“A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough -- I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn't his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician -- every nurse will understand what I mean -- who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn't talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life -- what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure.”
― Ellen Glasgow, The Shadowy Third

“When doctor saves a life, he also saves a family.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“An incompetent doctor practices, but a competent doctor performs.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Medicines ensures lengthy life but not necessarily healthy life.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“It would be futile to delude ourselves that at present, readers find every pathography unsavory. This attitude is excused with the reproach that from a pathographic elaboration of a great man one never obtains an understanding of his importance and his attainments, that it is therefore useless mischief to study in him things which could just as well be found in the first comer. However, this criticism is so clearly unjust that it can only be grasped when viewed as a pretext and a disguise for something. As a matter of fact pathography does not aim at making comprehensible the attainments of the great man; no one should really be blamed for not doing something which one never promised. The real motives for the opposition are quite different. One finds them when one bears in mind that biographers are fixed on their heroes in quite a peculiar manner. Frequently they take the hero as the object of study because, for reasons of their personal emotional life, they bear him a special affection from the very outset. They then devote themselves to a work of idealization which strives to enroll the great men among their infantile models, and to revive through him, as it were, the infantile conception of the father. For the sake of this wish they wipe out the individual features in his physiognomy, they rub out the traces of his life's struggle with inner and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in him anything of human weakness or imperfection; they then give us a cold, strange, ideal form instead of the man to whom we could feel distantly related. It is to be regretted that they do this, for they thereby sacrifice the truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies they let slip the opportunity to penetrate into the most attractive secrets of human nature.”
― Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood

“I can only explain my behaviour then by the mechanism of that dream vacuum wherein revolves a deranged mind.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“One professional I never wish to see is doctor.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“The need to imitate that the consumer experiences is truly an infantile need, one determined by every aspect of his fundamental disposession. In terms used by Gabel to describe quite another level of pathology, "the abnormal need for representation here compensates for a torturing feeling of being at the margin of existence".”
― Guy Debord

“What we value so much, the altruistic “good” side of human nature, can also have a dark side. Altruism can be the back door to hell.”
― Barbara Oakley, Pathological Altruism

“...every social class has its own pathology...”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“Delusion has its roots in pathology. It is a "false belief, held with absolute conviction, despite superior evidence." Delusion is a sign you are not functioning. But I believe in delusion as a creative exercise. A way to augment reality.”
― Corinne Mucha, The Monkey in the Basement and Other Delusions

“By the deficits we may know the talents, by the exceptions we may know the rules, by studying patholgoy we may construct a model of health.”
― Laurence Miller

“The pathology of greed is always greater than the object that greed pursues. Therefore, anything obtained by greed will eventually be killed by the very greed that worked so diligently to possess it. Hence, the pathology.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Memory research that supports a non-pathologizing, coherence-based model of symptom production in the wide range of cases where symptoms are generated by emotional memory. This is the central perspective of the Emotional Coherence Framework.”
― Bruce Ecker, Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at Their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation

“Pathology is a fact independent of the observer, but how one responds to symptoms is drawn from knowledge and experience.”
― Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

“All biological and artificial mechanisms -no matter how well designed- are vulnerable to malfunctions, failures, and breakdowns. Even if developmental processes are canalized against perturbations, they can deviate from their target phenotype as random events and disturbances accumulate over time.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Mutation load has been proposed as a likely explanation for the persistence of common, heritable, and harmfulmental disorders like autism and schizophrenia.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“The evolved preference for sugary and fatty foods (a functional mechanism) may lead to obesity because of a mismatch with modern nutrition (a maladaptive outcome), which in turn increases the risk of heart failure (a harmful dysfunction).”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“As a rule, sexually selected traits tend to be more condition-dependent --and thus more vulnerable to dysfunctions-- than other phenotypes. This contributes to explain why males are generally more vulnerable to both harmful mutations and environmental insults.”
― Marco del Giudice, Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach

“Self-diagnosis is a modern day healthcare crisis.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“While we readily see the problem with a person being oblivious to or dismissive of his problematic thinking and behavior, we are not as quick to see the problem with someone obsessively dwelling on whatever negative aspect of himself that looms forth in his mind at the moment. Mental health counselors recognize both of these behaviors as equally pathological in blocking the individual's ability to make positive changes.”
― Eric Bjarnson Ph.D., Some Universals, Vol. 2: Intention and Attention