Darwin's Worms Quotes

“The past influences everything and dictates nothing.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“Darwin and Freud, as we shall see, are notably sceptical about what was once called the 'perfectibility' of Man. Indeed, for both of them we are the animals who seem to suffer, above all, from our ideals. Indeed,it is part of the moral gist of their work not merely that we use our ideals to deny, to over-protect ourselves from, reality; but that these ideals - of redemption, of cure, of progress, of absolute knowledge, of pure goodness - are refuges that stop us living in the world as it is and finding out what it is like, and therefore what we could be like in it”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“Darwin and Freud... in their quite different ways are persuading us to become good losers; to be able, if need be, to dispel our attachment to people and ideas, and ultimately to ourselves.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“If it has been a tendency of at least Western belief systems to value what is immortal – God, Truth, the Soul – Darwin and Freud encourage us to describe what this craving for continuities might be a solution to. And they press us to think of our lives as more miraculous than our deaths; our death is inevitable, but our conception is not.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“...it is literally our nature to die.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“...death ... it denoted for Freud an object of passionate desire; the lover who ultinately will not refuse us, and yet who takes everyone.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“Lives dominated by impossible ideals – complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness, eternal love – are lives experienced as continuous failure.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“The belief in permanence – the hardest belief to give up – is an attack on pleasure. Good mourning, in Freud's terms, keeps people moving on, keeps them in time; bad mourning becomes something to an ascetic personal religion. It is impossible to love life, Freud intimates, without loving transience. Religion shores promises against our ruin.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“What do we need to believe in order to love nature, and so, by implication, human nature?”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“What do we need to believe to love nature, and so, by implication, human nature?”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“In Darwin's writing people, as animals, may be unhappy, but they are doing what they cannot help do; in Freud's account people are equally driven, but their unhappiness shows they are divided against themselves. They always seem to want more than, or something other than, their mere existence and the reproduction of their genetic inheritance. As though our nature is to demand of nature more than it can give. There is a fantasy life that is a theatre of excess.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“We have been looking, they suggest, in the wrong place, for the wrong things; spellbound by ideas of progress and self-knowledge only to discover ... that they quite literally did not exist, and didn't give us the kinds of loves we wanted ... That the one pleasure we have denied ourselves is the pleasure of reality...”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“Darwin and Freud ... are notably sceptical about what was once called the 'perfectability' of Man. Indeed, for both of them we are the animals who seem to suffer, above all, from our ideals. Indeed, it is part of the moral gist of their work not merely that we use our ideals to deny, to over-protect ourselves from, reality; but that these ideals – of redemption, of cure, of progress, of absolute knowledge, of pure goodness – are refuges that stop us living in the world as it is and finding out what it is like, and therefore what we could be like in it.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“If, once, we could think of ourselves as (sinful) animals aspiring to be more God-like, now we can wonder what, as animals without sin (though more than capable of doing harm), we might aspire to.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“In their notes from the underground they are not seeking stays against time. They are unseduced by monuments.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“They are only pessimists compared to certain previous forms of optimism (the belief in redemption, or progress, or the perfectability of Man).”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“the three truths they took for granted about 'Man' ere: that Man is an animal, that he must adapt sufficiently to his environment or he will die, and that he dies conclusively.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“Conflict, and therefore anguish and unease, are integral to their sense of what life is like.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories

“if we ditched redemption, say, or dreams of perfect happiness or complete knowledge, or took our histories more to heart, we might be more happily in this world rather than any other one”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories