Procrustean Bed Quotes & Sayings

Let us not make a procrustean bed of trans issues and force deities of the past onto it, let us instead awaken trans and other gender-variant deities from their own beds! There is no possibility of blasphemy against existing powers and their human followers if the deities in question are our own, and we never have to "take them back," because they have always been ours to begin with! — P. Sufenas Virius Lupus

The Procrustean bed ... suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairmen of many English departments.) There's just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it. — Anne Fadiman

I have resolved that from this day on, I will do all the business I can honestly, have all the fun I can reasonably, do all the good I can willingly, and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The sixth gift is Joy. May it keep your heart open and filled with light. — Charlene Costanzo

It is, indeed, a fact that, in the midst of society and sociability every evil inclination has to place itself under such great restraint, don so many masks, lay itself so often on the procrustean bed of virtue, that one could well speak of a martyrdom of the evil man. In solitude all this falls away. He who is evil is at his most evil in solitude: which is where he is at his best - and thus to the eye of him who sees everywhere only a spectacle also at his most beautiful. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Concerns itself with the linguistic, ethical, legal, and ritual conventions which provide the society with its system of communication. Confucianism, in other words, preoccupies itself with conventional knowledge, and under its auspices children are brought up so that their originally wayward and whimsical natures are made to fit the Procrustean bed of the social order. The individual defines himself and his place in society in terms of the Confucian formulae. — Alan W. Watts

Some psychologists and philosophers are distrustful of the concept of self. They argue against it because they do not like separating man from the continuum with animals, and they believe the concept of the self gets in the way of scientific experimentation. But rejecting the concept of "self" as "unscientific" because it cannot be reduced to mathematical equations is roughly the same as the argument two and three decades ago that Freud's theories and the concept of "unconscious" motivation were "unscientific." It is a defensive and dogmatic science - and therefore not true science - which uses a particular scientific method as a Procrustean bed and rejects all forms of human experience which don't fit. — Rollo May

I hate getting old, but I'm sticking with it! — James Rosenquist

The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear - the simplification that distorts. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Without religion, I believe that learning does real mischief to the morals and principles of mankind. — Benjamin Rush

The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals. — Felix Frankfurter

Some animals utter a loud cry. Some are silent, and others have a voice, which in some cases may be expressed by a word; in others, it cannot. There are also noisy animals and silent animals, musical and unmusical kinds, but they are mostly noisy about the breeding season. — Aristotle.

The self is a
self-made
Procrustean bed
of little comfort — Ulf Wolf

Dessert is probably the most important stage of the meal, since it will be the last thing your guests remember before they pass out all over the table. — William Powell

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad
at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Each person is a unique individual. Hence, psychotherapy should be formulated to meet the uniqueness of the individual's needs, rather than tailoring the person to fit the Procrustean bed of a hypothetical theory of human behavior. — Milton H. Erickson

What we are is seldom what we want to be, while what we want to be is either denied us or changes with the seasons. — Gore Vidal