We have to realize that we are as deeply afraid to live and to love as we are to die.
R. D. LaingRead
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
Interpretation
What this quote means
We often create more suffering for ourselves by trying to escape pain rather than facing it.
R. D. Laing's quote highlights a profound psychological insight: the pain we experience in life is inevitable, but the efforts we make to avoid it can sometimes lead to greater suffering. Instead of trying to evade discomfort, acknowledging and accepting it may lead to a healthier and more fulfilling life, as the struggle against pain often complicates our emotions and experiences.
Themes
PainLifeSufferingAcceptancePsychology
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational talk about facing challenges.
More from R. D. Laing
All quotes βMadness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.
R. D. LaingRead
Whether life is worth living depends on whether there is love in life.
R. D. LaingRead
The experience and behavior that gets labeled schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.
R. D. LaingRead
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
R. D. LaingRead
Here we have the paradox, the potentially tragic paradox, that our relatedness to others is an essential aspect of our being, as is our separateness, but any particular person is not a necessary part of our being.
R. D. LaingRead
Similar quotes
Much is now being said about evangelism; but before we get effective evangelism, we have to get effective evangelists. Evangelism is useless unless it is the work of one devoted to God, willing and glad to suffer all things for God, penetrated by the attractiveness of God. New machinery, adaptations and adjustments, are not the first need... but more devoted, adoring, sacrificial souls.
Evelyn UnderhillRead
The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. [...]After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn't slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the universe.
Fernando PessoaRead
Unless you come out of your mind and become a no-mind you will not know what life is all about, you will live in vain. You will not have your honeymoon, it is impossible. You will not know the sweetness that existence is full of and the ecstasy.
RajneeshRead
Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
Sinclair LewisRead
If it is not totalitarian to arrest a man and detain him, when you cannot charge him with any offence against any written law β if that is not what we have always cried out against in Fascist states β then what is it?β¦ If we are to survive as a free democracy, then we must be prepared, in principle, to concede to our enemies β even those who do not subscribe to our views β as much constitutional rights as you concede yourself.
Lee Kuan YewRead
Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.
John BergerRead