Bertrand Russell Quotes

The thing with psychoanalysis is I know basically what happened in my childhood. I know where things went wrong and I know what my mother said at one point and what my father said at one point.

Freud, Sigmund: A man so dissatisfied with his own mother and father that he devoted his life to convincing everyone who would listen — or better still, talk — that their parents were just as bad.

Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love- and its partner, hate. Our father-our "second other"-elaborates on them.

From the moment of birth, when the Stone-Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence called love, as its father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential.

We have nothing to fear but our mothers.

One thing I know is that it is a bad idea to marry someone who had bad parents. If they hated their mother, if they were hated by their mother or father, your marriage will pay for it in ways both obvious and subtle. When the chips are down, when someone is sick or loses their job or gets scared, the old patterns will kick in and he will treat you the way he treated his mother or the way she treated him.

I'm moved by contraries, by opposites, the strength that was my mother's eyes, the beauty of my father's hands.

When a man reaches his maturity in understanding and in years, the feeling comes over him that his father was wrong to beget him.

We long for our father. We wear his clothes, and actually try to fill his shoes. . . . We hang on to him, begging him to teach ushow to do whatever is masculine, to throw balls or be in the woods or go see where he works. . . . We want our fathers to protect us from coming too completely under the control of our mothers. . . . We want to be seen with Dad, hanging out with men and doing men things.

I can't imagine laying a finger on my kids. I go the other way and probably because my father was so abusive.

I don't mind praying to the Eternal Father, but I must be the only man in the country afflicted with an eternal mother.

My childhood was bad. No father. Mother was greedy and brought me up awful - never made me breakfast once. I don't want to get started. One story is worse than another.

People say you don't need a father to be successful. I take offense to that. I had an argument with my mom about Father's Day and why it's not celebrated like Mother's Day.

Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.

How can you just leave me standing? Alone in a world that's so cold? (So cold) Maybe I'm just too demanding, Maybe I'm just like my father too bold.Maybe you're just like my mother She's never satisfied (She's never satisfied) Why do we scream at each other? This is what it sounds like when doves cry.

Jane-Sweetie, we've talked about your weight-" my mother began. I'm only eight years old," I said. "How about I promise to be anorexic later?

The person who received maximum affection from mother, that person also sort of cultivated the potential showing affection to others.

I feel so grateful to my mother and father for a happy childhood. There are things I now understand that they were able to give me that are very special.

There's not one woman in America who does not care about her hair, but we give it way too much value. We deprive ourselves of things, we use it to destroy each other, we'll look at a child and judge a mother and her sense of motherhood by the way the child's hair looks. I am not going to traumatize my child about her hair. I want her to love her hair.

I thought of my mother (...). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong.

Every boy, in his journey to become a man, takes an arrow in the center of his heart, in the place of his strength. Because the wound is rarely discussed and even more rarely healed, every man carries a wound. And the wound is nearly always given by his father.

I just read about John Le Carre, the great spy novelist. He had an absolutely miserable childhood. His mother deserted him when he was young. His father was a playboy and a drunk. He was shifted around to many different homes. He knew he was a writer when he was about nine, but he was dyslexic. So here was a person with an absolutely messed-up childhood and a symptom that prevented him from doing what he wanted to do most. Yet that very symptom was part of the calling. It forced him to go deeper.

I've inherited the worst of each parent. I have my father's hypochondria and lack of concentration. I have his amorality. I have everything bad that he had. Then I have my mother's surly, pill-like, complaining, whining attitude.

Attachment is misery, but from the very beginning the child is taught for attachment. The mother will say to the child, "Love me; I am your mother." The father will say, "Love me; I am your father" - as if someone is a father or a mother so he becomes automatically lovable.

My mother was into opera and my father was into jazz, so there was a lot of jazz in the house where I grew up.