R.D. Laing

"The greatest gift is understanding."

"We are the stories we tell about ourselves."

"Freedom is frightening."

"Imagination is the beginning of creation."

"We are all searching for the same thing: to be truly seen."

"Peace is not the absence of conflict."

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but first the eye must be free."

"Death is the only certainty we have."

"The heart knows what the mind cannot grasp."

"The difficulty is that we are culturally induced to believe that our sense of self is something we can know, when actually it is something we can only be."

"We are dead, but we don't know it."

"Madness is to be understood as a natural healing process."

"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one's mind, is the condition of the normal man."

"If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know."

"Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus normal."

"There is no such condition as schizophrenia, but the label is a social fact and the social fact is a political event."

"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."

"True sanity entails in some sense the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self that we constructed to protect ourselves against the world."

"Each person is a universe, yet we are trained to deny this."

"The world is not divided into the sane and the insane; we are all a bit mad."

"To cope with the loss of love, we deny loss itself, and with it, the reality of loss."

"What we call normal is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience."

"Families are in a sense the universe's way of multiplying loneliness."

"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice."

"Experience is something we all have, yet we know almost nothing about it."

"We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love."

"The bond which links your true family is not one of blood but of respect and joy in each other's life."

"Hate is the complement of fear and fear is the complement of hate."

"In an age of atomic power, we are afraid to trust our own power."

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men and women."