8 Quotes About Grandiosity

Men have nothing in common with me--there is no point of contact; they have foolish little feelings and foolish little vanities and impertinences and ambitions; their foolish little life is but a laugh, a sigh, and extinction; and they have no sense. Only the Moral Sense. I will show you what I mean. Here is a red spider, not so big as a pin's head. Can you imagine an elephant being interested in him-- caring whether he is happy or isn't, or whether he is wealthy or poor, whether his sweetheart returns his love or not, whether his mother is sick or well, whether he is looked up to in society or not, whether his enemies will smite him or his friends desert him, whether his hopes will suffer blight or his political ambitions fail, whether he shall die in the bosom of his family or neglected and despised in a foreign land? These things can never be important to the elephant; they are nothing to him; he cannot shrink his sympathies to the microscopic size of them. Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant. The elephant has nothing against the spider--he cannot get down to that remote level; I have nothing against man. The elephant is indifferent; I am indifferent. Mark Twain

Children are born with imaginations in mint condition, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Then life corrects for grandiosity. Phyllis Theroux

Although the outward picture of depression is quite the opposite of that of grandiosity and has a quality that expresses the tragedy of the loss of self in a more obvious way, they have many points in common:- The false self that has led to the loss of the potential true self - A fragility of self-esteem because of a lack of confidence in one’s own feelings and wishes- Perfectionism- Denial of rejected feelings- A preponderance of exploitative relationships- An enormous fear of loss of love and therefore a great readiness to conform- Split-off aggression- Oversensitivity- A readiness to feel shame and guilt- Restlessness . Alice MIller

Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’  Tony Schwartz

By aggrandizing one's own abilities and achievements, the grandiose person remains out of touch with who they truly are and as such, remains prone to crossing the boundaries of others. Steven Franssen

The idea to go West just fell into my lap from the sky. Go west, young man. That’s how the best ideas happen. Just out of nowhere. When you’re not even thinking. Like they’ve been created for you and you just have to reach out and grab them before someone else does. Shannon Mullen

Psychoanalysis has suffered the accusation of being “unscientific” from its very beginnings (Schwartz, 1999). In recent years, the Berkeley literary critic Frederick Crews has renewed the assault on the talking cure in verbose, unreadable articles in the New York Review of Books (Crews, 1990), inevitably concluding, because nothing else really persuades, that psychoanalysis fails because it is unscientific. The chorus was joined by philosopher of science, Adolf Grunbaum (1985), who played both ends against the middle: to the philosophers he professed specialist knowledge of psychoanalysis; to the psychoanalysts he professed specialist knowledge of science, particularly physics. Neither was true (Schwartz, 1995a, b, 1996a, b, 2000). The problem that mental health clinicians always face is that we deal with human subjectivity in a culture that is deeply invested in denying the importance of human subjectivity. Freud’s great invention of the analytic hour allows us to explore, with our clients, their inner worlds. Can such a subjective instrument be trusted? Not by very many. It is so dangerously close to women’s intuition. Socalled objectivity is the name of the game in our culture. Nevertheless, 100 years of clinical practice have shown psychoanalysis and psychotherapy not only to be effective, but to yield real understandings of the dynamics of human relationships, particularly the reality of transference—countertransference re-enactments now reformulated by our neuroscientists as right brain to right brain communication (Schore, 1999). . Joseph Schwartz