Norman O. Brown quotes

I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Personality #Property

Love without attachment is light.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Light #Attachment

Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Ideas #Unhappy #Progress

The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by spitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Reality #Self #Ego

To be is to be vulnerable.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Vulnerable #Vulnerability

Truth is error burned up.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Truth #Errors #Truth Is

The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God's ape; the money complex is therefore the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Religious #Money #Heirs

To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Ambition #Ghost #Remembered

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Essence #Common Sense #Long

All currency is neurotic currency.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Currency #Neurotic

I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way to pay the price for saying or seeing things.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Deeds #Pay #Gaps

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Psychology #Society #Progress

Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Mad #Way #Madness

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Common Sense #Liberty #Violence

To love is to transform; to be a poet.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Love #Love Is #Poet

The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Dynamics #Enjoyment #Capitalism

The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Exercise #Self #Order

Meaning is not in things but in between them.
-- Norman O. Brown

The human body is not a thing or a substance, given, but a continuous creation.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Substance #Body #Creation

The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Reality #Insane #Favors

Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope.
-- Norman O. Brown

#Fashion #Humanity #Survival

History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.
-- Norman O. Brown

#History #Stage #Commemoration