Quotes About Addiction

Addiction is a symptom of not growing up. I know people think it's a disease... If you have a brain tumor, if you have cancer, that's a disease. To say that an addiction is a disease is not fair to the real diseases of the world.

Tobacco addiction sinks its claws in deeply, it's just as powerful of [sic] an addiction as heroin or crack cocaine.

Entrepreneurship is an addiction to being successful, not a job or career. You have to feed the addiction and recharge from it or you'll burn out.

Addiction is craving fulfillment from something that cannot provide fulfillment. In this sense it is not different than the basic mechanism of ignorance that keeps everyone in bondage. With substance addiction the mind/body sets up a vicious cycle that perpetuates the dependence.

I think I have an adrenaline addiction, no question about that.

Once it's established that we are a team, I can demand of you and expect you to demand of me. Life without pain is an addiction and the fantasy of perpetual happiness is like the "delusion of fusion."

Running is my addiction. It's always present. I'm constantly thinking about my next run.

I used to find myself goofed out in the street on drugs. And I had such a bad problem with addiction at the time that I didn't mind. I was dealing cocaine and shooting up a lot of cocaine. And that's not a good space to be in.

Sex addiction is a subject that should be discussed

Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending

I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.

The roots of addiction can be seen in our search for happiness in something outside of our self, be it drugs, relationships, material possessions.

Addiction has the capacity to disconnect the human will and nullify moral agency. It can rob one of the power to decide.

People who have never had an addiction don't understand how hard it can be.

[On her morphine addiction:] I was meant to 'taper off.' At times I felt such pains as must afflict a creature while a bigger beast eats and claws at its middle. God-awful things were hiding underneath my bed, and it was no use telling me they were not there - I knew they were, and felt their dreadful ever-changing shapes.

If a child has an older sibling involved in an addiction, there is a 90 percent chance that he or she will get involved too.

Footbal is very much an addiction for me. This is something that I really need in my life. This is something that if I don't have it, I'm not a very pleasant person to be around.

I also had my own addiction to cocaine and heroin in my 20s. I knew that it was driven not by the things that the drug workers were telling me; in fact, I couldn't believe any drug information that was given to me by authorities because I knew from my own experience that it was wrong.

I know this is going to sound crazy, but I really love working out. I know that sounds sick to some people, but I didn't love it at first. It's become a healthy addiction for me. And like, now, if I'm watching TV on the couch I'm like, "Ugh, I could be on a cardio machine watching the same thing." That's just now how my mind thinks.

I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help they have no hope.

Making my family laugh when I was little - it became an addiction. It was a kind of survival.

All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

Drugs are about dulling perception, about addiction and about behavioral repetition...What *psychedelics* are about is pattern- dissolving experiences of an extraordinarily high or different awareness. They are the exact opposite of drugs. They promote questioning , they promote consciousness, they promote value examinations, they promote the reconstruction of behavioral patterns.

So to me, what the drugs and addiction are saying is that I deserve to feel good, I'm allowed to take this because look how I was treated as a child. Our authority figures, particularly our parents are hypnotic. Their words are hypnotic literally to small children because of brain wave patterns.

According to a recent study, ten percent of 'Star Trek' fans meet the psychological criteria for addiction. Deprived of their favourite show, some Trekkies disply withdrawal symptoms similar to drug addicts. Of course, the real difference is that drug addicts aren't nearly as annoying.

Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain.

For many, negative thinking is a habit, which over time, becomes an addiction... A lot of people suffer from this disease because negative thinking is addictive to each of the Big Three - the mind, the body, and the emotions. If one doesn't get you, the others are waiting in the wings.

Now there is apparently a causal link between heroin addiction and vegetarianism.

Smoking sucks! The one thing I would say to my kid is, ‘It’s not just that it’s bad for you. Do you want to spend the rest of your life fighting a stupid addiction to a stupid thing that doesn’t even really give you a good buzz?'

Friends with benefits? More than friends? Don't sample the goodies unless you're willing to risk addiction and withdrawal.

It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behaviour.

I'm fascinated by the whole issue of arousal addiction, which seems to be mostly a problem for young men.

When you get into recovery after some addiction you have to relearn a lot of perceptions, attitudes and self-awareness if you want to stay clean. You really do change. Change doesn't happen often but to a certain extent in some way, I think when you get into recovery and you stay there, you change.

Right now one in three teenagers meets the medical criteria for addiction, which is scary. I'm so driven because when I walked into rehab, I was like, "Am I still drunk? Did the guys give me the wrong address? Am I at a summer camp?" And it kills them. Deaths attributed to drugs and alcohol have overtaken all other emergency-room deaths.

I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs... my addiction is wrestling - my obsession is competition.

We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war.

However, there probably is a slight connection between the high-wire, super sensitivity, open to everything and too much, and slightly fragile soul of the artist and the need to self-medicate, which can lead to bad trouble either in drugs, or alcohol. So it's not that there's no connection, it's just that we can't make too much of it because it isn't the addiction that's the issue, it's the fragility of some people who do artistic work, who end up in rehab somewhere or other.

Feel the wounded heart that's underneath the addiction, self-loathing, or anger.

Yes, creative people are more prone to addiction or addictive behavior. But, equally as prone is your mailman, your mother, your brother, your friend, the guy who does your banking. It's everywhere. The thing that happens in the press sometimes is Whitney Houston. She was just an addict. Just like your uncle Steve.

I went public with the alcoholism, very early on... the early '70s. Mercedes McCambridge, the actress, I think was the first recognizable person that went before Congress and talked about it, and I thought that was a good idea, to take some of the stigma away from it and say "Normal, average people can fall prey to it." So it's been public for me. I did a movie about an alcoholic. And today, you're nobody unless you've been to rehab. It seems like everybody has some kind of an addiction.

The Drug War is an addiction, really.

The only guy that speaks at any sort of depth is, in my mind, Eminem. He's a guy that does music that talks about the struggles of addiction and before that violence, with growing up in a broken family, not being a good enough father. So, you know that's what I enjoy about it. It's harder to listen to than ever before because I have a bunch of kids and you just can't put it on.

We know that material things don't offer contentment, but we still buy more-more of the props and gadgets our culture tells us we must have in order to be happy and "happening." Our addiction to consumption distracts us from seeing that we are disconnected from ourselves, from our truth and from one another. Any euphoria we gain from our material gains is fleeting at best.

How important is it really that you feel satisfied right now for 2 minutes, compared to getting yourself free from addiction forever?

You know you are addicted to a food if despite knowing it is bad for you and despite wanting to change, you still keep eating it. Addiction means that a craving has more control over your behavior than you do.

Whether you sniff it smoke it eat it or shove it up your ass the result is the same: addiction.