Quote preview background for Thomas Lewis
Limbic pursuits sink slowly and steadily lower on America__ list of collective priorities. Top-ranking items remain the pursuit of wealth, physical beauty, youthful appearance, and the shifting, elusive markers of status. There are brief spasms of pleasure to be had at the end of those pursuits _ the razor-thin delight of the latest purchase, the momentary glee of flaunting this promotion or that unnecessary trinket _ pleasure here, but not contentment. Happiness is within range only for adroit people who give the slip to America__ values. These rebels will necessarily forgo exalted titles, glamorous friends, exotic vacations, washboard abs, designer everything _ all the proud indicators of upward mobility _ and in exchange, they may just get a chance at a decent life. (209)
Thomas Lewis A General Theory of Love
Turn into a Quote Card

Quote Detail

Limbic pursuits sink slowly and steadily lower on America__ list of collective priorities. Top-ranking items remain the pursuit of wealth, physical beauty, youthful appearance, and the shifting, elusive markers of status. There are brief spasms of pleasure to be had at the end of those pursuits _ the razor-thin delight of the latest purchase, the momentary glee of flaunting this promotion or that unnecessary trinket _ pleasure here, but not contentment. Happiness is within range only for adroit people who give the slip to America__ values. These rebels will necessarily forgo exalted titles, glamorous friends, exotic vacations, washboard abs, designer everything _ all the proud indicators of upward mobility _ and in exchange, they may just get a chance at a decent life. (209)
TL
Thomas Lewis

A General Theory of Love

Quick Answer

What this quote page tells you

This canonical quote page keeps the full saying, the attributed author, any linked work, and the topic tags together so the quote can be cited from one stable URL.

Related Quotes

More quote cards from the same area

"

A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right thing or to love the right person or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. People lack this capacity not through a deficiency of discipline but because the jurisdiction of will is limited to the latest brain and to those functions within its purview. Emotional life can be influenced, but it cannot be commanded.

TL
Thomas Lewis

A General Theory of Love

"

Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy__ joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind's fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

AR
Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged

"

The United States alone sports an inventive spectrum of psychotherapeutic sects and schools: Freudians, Jungians, Kleinians; narrative, interpersonal, transpersonal therapists; cognitive, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral practitioners; Kohutians Rogerians, Kernbergians; aficionados of control mastery, hypnotherapy, neurolingustic programming, eye movement desensitization- that list does not even complete the top twenty. The disparate doctrines of these proliferative, radiating divisions, often reach mutually exclusive conclusions about therapeutic propriety: talk about this, not that; answer questions, or don__; sit facing the patient, next to the patient, behind the patient. Yet no approach has ever proven its method superior to any other. Strip away a therapist__ orientation, the journal he reads, the books on his shelves, the meetings he attends- the cognitive framework his rational mind demands _ and what is left to define the psychotherapy he conducts?Himself. The person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is. (186/7)

TL
Thomas Lewis

A General Theory of Love