Neel Burton Quotes & Sayings

Madness is like wine: small amounts are inspiring, but too much can make you ill. — Neel Burton

I've come to realise that the most precious commodity in life is not money, time, or even health as such, but mental energy. We should take great care in nurturing, protecting, and directing our mental energies. — Neel Burton

A man shrinks or expands into the degree and nature of his ambition. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers. — Neel Burton

Facing up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make the most out of our lives and out of ourselves. — Neel Burton

Maths is at only one remove from magic. — Neel Burton

Wine is a story that gives birth to stories, and man, a story-telling animal. — Neel Burton

True friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and by teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion. — Neel Burton

Drinking turns a fool into a merry fool. — Neel Burton

Philosophy gives life to life. — Neel Burton

One needs to be either more brave or more good, because if courage is lacking goodness can substitute, while cowardice is the deficiency of both. — Neel Burton

If you paint the world in black and white you lose its colour. — Neel Burton

A genius is no more - and no less - than someone who insists on the truth, while others face the other way. — Neel Burton

My cough is much worse at night and often prevents me from sleeping. It is not so much the daytime tiredness that I resent, but the inability to proceed uninter- rupted with my dreams, to run and play with my fancies, and, at last, in the early hours of the morning, to be visited with visions like a holy madman. The dreamer is like a Delian diver, fishing for pearls from the depths of our inner sea of knowledge; and I must have solved, or rather resolved, many more problems in my sleep than in my conscious hours. — Neel Burton

Anxiety, says Kierkegaard, is the dizziness of freedom. — Neel Burton

By denying the importance of that which most people fear or strive for, the ascetic is able not only to absolve himself from their lot of anxieties and disappointments, but also to search for a higher purpose and perspective, reconnect with the timelessness and universality of the human experience, and, paradoxically, receive the respect, admiration, and honours of the very people whom he repudiated. — Neel Burton

It takes ten good decisions to make up for one disastrous one. This is why it is better not to make nine good decisions than to make one bad one - which is what happens most of the time. — Neel Burton

Philosophy is an act of seduction between one true lover and another, most often the philosopher and himself. — Neel Burton

Although selfhood depends causally upon the existence of the brain, it amounts to something far more than the brain. This something is vague and intangible, and might best be described, I think, as a semi-fictional narrative that is in constant need of writing, editing, and preserving. — Neel Burton

I can't believe I spent 13 years at school and never got taught cooking, gardening, conversation, massage, Latin, or philosophy. What were they thinking? That I would somehow live off inorganic chemistry? — Neel Burton

the best education consists not in being taught but in being inspired, — Neel Burton

Unlike 'mere' medical or physical disorders, mental disorders are not just problems. If successfully navigated, they can also present opportunities. Simply acknowledging this can empower people to heal themselves and, much more than that, to grow from their experiences. — Neel Burton

Man is mostly a collection of emotions, most of which he would do better not to be feeling. — Neel Burton

Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort. — Neel Burton

There are essentially three types of people: those who love life more than they fear it, those who fear life more than they love it, and those who have no clue what I'm talking about. — Neel Burton

In 1949, neurologist Egas Moniz (1874-1955) received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of 'the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses'. Today, prefrontal leucotomy is derided as a barbaric treatment from a much darker age, and it is to be hoped that, one day, so too might antipsychotic drugs. — Neel Burton

A man is rich not only by what he has, but also, and above all, by what he doesn't. — Neel Burton

The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened. — Neel Burton

Wine is one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman. — Neel Burton

Xenophobia is when you smile at people and they don't smile back. — Neel Burton

As so often in life, it is not a case of true and false, but of true and more true. — Neel Burton

Gratitude promotes consciousness, enthusiasm, joy, empathy, and tranquillity, while protecting from anxiety, sadness, loneliness, regret, and envy, with which it is fundamentally incompatible. — Neel Burton

Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating. — Neel Burton

Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing. — Neel Burton

According to Aristotle, envy is pain for the presence of good things in others, whereas emulation is pain for their absence in us. This is a subtle but critical difference. Unlike envy, which is self-defeating, emulation is a good thing because it makes us take steps towards securing good things. — Neel Burton

If you say it very softly, with a smile, you can get away with saying almost anything, even the truth. — Neel Burton

Many things can prolong your life, but only wisdom can save it. — Neel Burton

A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be 'treated' and 'cured' by any means possible - often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person's interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity. — Neel Burton

Self-deception is a defining part of our human nature. By recognizing its various forms in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able to disarm them and even, in some cases, to employ and enjoy them. This self-knowledge opens up a whole new world before us, rich in beauty and subtlety, and frees us not only to take the best out of it, but also to give it back the best of ourselves, and, in so doing, to fulfil our potential as human beings. I don't really think it's a choice. — Neel Burton

Of all funny things, truth is the funniest. — Neel Burton

For all this, man is embodied and trusting in his senses; he had sooner believe in a sensible improbability than in an insensible uncertainty, that is, sooner worship an idol than grapple with the philosophers. — Neel Burton

An artist is someone who, needing nothing and no one, wants everything and everyone. — Neel Burton

Now, it so happens that our culture - or lack of it, for our culture is in a state of flux and crisis - places a high value on materialism, and, by extension, greed. Our culture's emphasis on greed is such that people have become immune to satisfaction. Having acquired one thing, they are immediately ready to desire the next thing that might suggest itself. Today, the object of desire is no longer satisfaction, but desire itself. — Neel Burton

When you uncork a bottle of mature fine wine, what you are drinking is the product of a particular culture and tradition, a particular soil, a particular climate, the weather in that year, and the love and labour of people who may since have died. The wine is still changing, still evolving, so much so that no two bottles can ever be quite the same. By now, the stuff has become incredibly complex, almost ethereal. Without seeking to blaspheme, it has become something like the smell and taste of God. Do you drink it alone? Never. The better a bottle, the more you want to share it with others ... and that is the other incredible thing about wine, that it brings people together, makes them share with one another, laugh with one another, fall in love with one another and with the world around them. — Neel Burton

It seems to me that there are three principal scales of time, the present moment, a human lifetime, and the eternal. The problem with modern man is not so much that he situates himself in the future of a human lifetime, since he fears death far too much to do that, but rather than he does not situate himself in any of these three scales of time. Instead, he is forever stuck somewhere in-between, this evening, tomorrow morning, next week, next Christmas, in five years' time. As a result, he has neither the joy of the present moment, nor the satisfied accomplishments of a human lifetime, nor the perspective and immortality of the eternal. — Neel Burton

Relative poverty is when you have more taste than money. — Neel Burton

Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By recognizing their traits in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able both to contain them and to put them to good use. This is, no doubt, the highest form of genius. — Neel Burton

When we stop noticing small things, we are no longer truly alive. — Neel Burton

No one ever pays to learn the most important things. — Neel Burton

According to the Buddha, the failure to recognize the illusion of the self is the source of all ignorance and unhappiness. It is only by renouncing the self, that is, by dropping his ego defences and committing metaphorical suicide, that a person can open up to different modes of being and relating and thereby transform himself into a pure essence of humanity. In so doing, he becomes free to recast himself as a much more joyful and productive person, and attains the only species of transcendence and immortality that is open to man. — Neel Burton

The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the soul, curing it of improper emotions, false beliefs, and faulty judgments, which are the causes of so much hardship and handicap. To heal the body one turns to the practitioner of the art of healing the body, but to heal the soul there is no doctor to turn to, and each of us is left to become that doctor unto himself. Yet, this need not stop us from exhorting others to imitate us in the godly art, in the forlorn hope that they might transform themselves into better citizens for Athens and better companions for us. — Neel Burton

The two greatest warriors are Truth and Time. Be sure to march behind, and not against, them. — Neel Burton

Love is like chickenpox. It's much worse when it comes late. — Neel Burton

Man cannot bear to be in the wrong. As soon as he feels guilt or remorse, he bends his ethics to suit himself. Actions do not flow from ethics, but ethics from actions, and it is by refining our actions that we refine our ethics. — Neel Burton

In philosophy, phenomenology is the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Wine blind tasting is the best phenomenology, phenomenology par excellence, returning us from our heads into the world, and, at the same time, teaching us the methods of the mind. — Neel Burton

It is quite natural to think of the self as something concrete, but it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an abstract product of our minds, a convenient concept or schema that enables us to relate our present self with our past, future, and conditional selves, and thereby to create an illusion of coherence and continuity from a big jumble of disparate experiences. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that the self is nothing but the sum total of our ego defences, and that it is therefore tantamount to one gigantic ego defence, namely, the ego itself. The self is like a cracked mask that is in constant need of being pieced together. But behind the mask there is nobody at home. — Neel Burton

Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe. — Neel Burton

The very purpose of an ego defence such as reification (or indeed any ego defence) is, as the name implies, to protect and uphold a certain crystallized notion of self or 'I'. There is therefore an important sense in which the reifying self is itself reified. — Neel Burton

The things that people laugh about most are their errors and inadequacies; the difficult challenges that they face such as personal identity, social and sexual relationships, and death; and incongruity, absurdity, and meaninglessness. These are all deeply human concerns and challenges: just as no one has ever seen a laughing dog, so no one has ever heard about a laughing god. — Neel Burton

When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce ... in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. — Neel Burton

Socrates is a shining example of a man who bravely lived up to his ideals, and, in the end, bravely died for them. Throughout his life, he never lost faith in the mind's ability to discern and decide, and so to apprehend and master reality. Nor did he ever betray truth and integrity for a pitiable life of self-deception and semi-consciousness. In seeking relentlessly to align mind with matter and thought with fact, he remained faithful both to himself and to the world, with the result that he is still alive in this sentence and millions of others that have been written about him. More than a great philosopher, Socrates was the living embodiment of the dream that philosophy might one day set us free. — Neel Burton

In refining their senses and aesthetic judgement, blind tasters become much more conscious of the richness not only of wine but also of other potentially complex beverages such as tea, coffee, and spirits, and, by extension, the flavours in food, the scents in the air, and the play of light in the world. For life is consciousness, and consciousness is life. — Neel Burton

The notion of dream interpretation far antedates the birth of psychoanalysis, and probably served an important function in most, if not all, historical societies. In having lost this function, modern man has also lost the best part of his nature, which he obliviously passes on to the next generation of dreamers. — Neel Burton

The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education. — Neel Burton

Other pressing problems with the current medical model [of mental disorder] is that it encourages false epidemics, most glaringly in bipolar disorder and ADHD, and the wholesale exportation of Western mental disorders and Western accounts of mental disorder. Taken together, this is leading to a pandemic of Western disease categories and treatments, while undermining the variety and richness of the human experience. — Neel Burton

Man first creates the universe in his image, and then turns round to say that God created man in his image ... As Voltaire quipped, if God created man in his image, man has returned the compliment. — Neel Burton

Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness. — Neel Burton

It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made. — Neel Burton

My basic political principle: If something, whether right- or left-wing, is driven by love and solidarity, it is right; if it is driven by hate and fear it is wrong. Simple as that. — Neel Burton

Our life is just as long or short as our memory, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking. — Neel Burton

Resentment is a powerful and corrosive force, both on the slippery left and the slippery right, and the history of humankind can largely be read as a history of resentment. Aside from a profound philosophy of capital, what we really need is a profound psychology and philosophy of resentment. We must learn to live for ourselves, without reference to the other, and, at the same time, to rise above and beyond ourselves. Or else history will keep repeating itself, and our life will be a living death. — Neel Burton

As it stands, the diagnostic criteria for depression are so loose that two people with absolutely no symptoms in common can both end up with the same unitary diagnosis of depression. For this reason especially, the concept of depression as a mental disorder has been charged with being little more than a socially constructed dustbin for all manner of human suffering. — Neel Burton

The three most powerful seasonings are hunger, variety, and gratitude. — Neel Burton