Sublimation Quotes

“It’s so easy to lose faith and become lost in all of the politics of the world. That’s why we need the arts. To sublimate our frustration and anger into something beautiful. Freud called sublimation a virtuous defence mechanism because it is in the arts that we can find our humanity.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“I worry about you. You’re good with people, I’ve seen it. You like them. But there’s a limit for you.” He opened his mouth to protest but she held up her hand to silence him. “I know. You do care. But inside the framework of a project. Right now it’s your studies. Later it’ll be roads and bridges. But people around you—their lives go on outside the framework. They’re not just tools to your hand, even likable tools. Your life should go on, too. You should have more than roads to live for. Because if something does go wrong, you’ll need what you’re feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.”
― Kij Johnson, Asimov's Science Fiction, October/November 2011

“The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word...”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“One can only worry so much, however; then one becomes philosophical. I suppose philosophy is merely sublimated worry.”
― Paul Bowles, The Stories of Paul Bowles

“Religion must now recognize that our deep antisocial impulses when denied and repressed do not disappear miraculously from reality; the more we treat them like criminals, the more vengeance they take against us. Adults who strive for total repression of their impulses in the realm of imagination wreak havoc either on their bodies or their spirits.

The religion of the future should take a page from the notebook of the psychotherapist, encouraging men to tolerate their unacceptable impulses, to sublimate them, and at the same time to discipline themselves to a finer and more generous program of action. It must strengthen mature men and women to realize that everyone has desires and fantasies antisocial in nature. Only when their presence is acknowledged rather than repressed can they be prevented from exercising dominion over us in the realm of action.”
― Joshua Loth Liebman, Peace of Mind: Insights on Human Nature That Can Change Your Life

“The Sublime. The almost tangible, entirely believable, mathematically verifiable nirvana just a few right-angle turns away from dear boring old reality: a vast, infinite, better-than-virtual ultra-existence with no Off switch, to which species and civilizations had been hauling their sorry tired-with-it-all behinds off to since - the story went - the galaxy had still been in metaphorical knee socks.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

“The celibate must firmly keep himself in Brahma Charya (i.e. chastity) until his wife arrives, he has to firmly establish himself in Brahma Charya and it is not possible to remain in Brahma Charya if we do not know how to transmute the sexual energy.”
― Samael Aun Weor

“Positive disintegration is the sublimation of suffering”
― Martijn Budel

“In order to grasp how exploitation is overcome by sublimation, it is not enough to stay with this standard definition of sublimation as the elevation of an ordinary object to the dignity of a Thing. As Lacan aptly demonstrated apropos courtly love, an ordinary object (woman) is there elevated to the dignity of the Thing, she becomes an “inhuman partner,” dangerous to get too close to, always out of reach, mixing horror and respect. The paradox of desire is here brought to an extreme, turning the experience of love into an endlessly postponed tragedy. In true love, however, comedy enters: while the beloved remains a Thing, it is simultaneously “desublimated,” accepted in all her ridiculous bodily imperfections. A true miracle is thus achieved: I can hold the Thing-jouissance in my hands, making fun of it and playing games with it, enjoying it without restraint – true love doesn’t idealize – or, as Lacan put it in his seminar on anxiety: “Only love-sublimation makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire.”
This enigmatic proposition was perspicuously interpreted by Alenka Zupančič who demonstrated how, in the comedy of love, sublimation paradoxically comprises its opposite, desublimation – you remain the Thing, but simultaneously I can use you for my enjoyment: “to love the other and to desire my own jouissance. To ‘desire one’s own jouissance’ is probably what is the hardest to obtain and to make work, since the enjoyment has trouble appearing as an object.” One should not shirk from a quite concrete and graphic description of what this amounts to: I love you, and I show this by fucking you just for pleasure, mercilessly objectivizing you – this is how I am no longer exploited by serving the Other’s enjoyment. When I worry all the time whether you also enjoy it, it is not love – “I love you” means: I want to be used as an object for your enjoyment. One should reject here all the Catholic nonsense of preferring the missionary position in sex because lovers can whisper tender words and communicate spiritually, and even Kant was too short here when he reduced the sexual act to reducing my partner to an instrument of my pleasure: self-objectivization is the proof of love, you find being used degrading only if there is no love. This enjoyment of mine should not be constrained even by the tendency to enable my partner to reach orgasm simultaneously with me – Brecht was right when, in his poem “Orges Wunschliste,” he includes in the wish-list of his preferences non-simultaneous orgasms: “Von den Mädchen, die neuen. / Von den Weibern, die ungetreuen. / Von den Orgasmen, die ungleichzeitigen. / Von den Feindschaften, die beiderseitigen.” “Of the girls, the new. / Of the women, the unfaithful. / Of orgasms, the non-simultaneous. / Of the animosities, the mutual.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain

“I feel too much. To feel too much is unhealthy. But an excess of sensitivity is the paint that colors the tormented castle of genius. All human greatness is pathological in origin. My suffering breathes life into me, more and more life, more life than I can deal with. It allows me to travel to places I might never otherwise have visited: places in the mind, in the soul, in the mythic layers of unspoken fears. It is the source of my secret strength. It is a strength of which even Nimue cannot deprive me.”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“The Shadow Archetype is the dark side of the psyche, the dark side of the “force”, representing wildness, chaos, the irrational, the unknown, the intoxicated, the out-of-control … all things Dionysian. Dionysus is the Shadow of Apollo. The Id is the Shadow of the Superego. If you want to have a healthy psyche, you must accommodate your Shadow, one way or another. You must have a Shadow space, where that energy can be explored, harnessed and sublimated.”
― Peter Brennan, Fusions Versus Fissions: Are You a Joiner or a Splitter?

“Time is an explicative that you can't get out fast enough.”
― Benjamin Aubrey Myers

“Leadership is about discipline, expurgation and sublimation ,not suzerainty and reign.”
― Prof.Salam Al Shereida

“La honte d'être un homme, y a-t-il une meilleure raison d'écrire ?”
― Gilles Deleuze, Critique et clinique

“There's a fine line between
limiting yourself
and knowing your limit.
Once you cross the line in,
you might eliminate,
or rather, sublime it!”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, A-Z of Happiness: Tips for Living and Breaking Through the Chain that Separates You from Getting That Dream Job