Quotes about Pathological

As long as I have people's attention, I can't stop. You can't put the public on hold, because they might not be there when you get back. I have a pathological fear of stopping.

Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration.

Egotism is pathological self-obsession, a reaction to anxiety about whether one really does count. It is a form of acute selfconsciousness and can be prevented and healed only by the experience of being adequately loved. It is, indeed, a desperate response to frustration of the need we all have to count for something and be held to be irreplaceable, without price.

There is, as we know, a philosophy which denies the infinite. There is also a philosophy, pathologically classified, which denies the sun; this philosophy is called blindness.

The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.

Perhaps that's why faith is so rare and religion so widespread: because religion is very often a means to maintain our familiar image of God, even when it's pathological and destructive. We feel better with what we know, even when it does us in.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.