Humanistic Psychology Quotes

The contribution of humanistic psychology to better relationships is recognized by the inclusion of Carl Rogers, whose influential book reminds us that relationships cannot flower if they don't have a climate of listening and nonjudgmental acceptance, and that empathy is the mark of a genuine person. ~ Tom Butler-Bowdon

Professor A. H. Maslow, for example, has conducted a series of researches into extremely healthy people that have led him to conclude that health and optimism are far more positive principles in human psychology than Freud would ever have admitted.

Man is a slave to the delusion that he is a passive creature, a creature of circumstance; this is because he makes the mistake of identifying himself with his limited everyday consciousness, and is unaware of the immense forces that lie just beyond the threshold of consciousness. But these forces, although he is unaware of them on a conscious level, are still a far more active influence in his life than any external circumstances. Freudian psychology, for all its achievements, has made a twofold error: it has tried to anatomize the human mind as a pathologist would dissect a corpse, and it has limited its researches to sick human beings. Sick men talk about their illness far more than healthy people talk about their health; in fact, healthy people are usually too absorbed in living to bother with self-revelation. Psychology has consequently been inclined to divide the world into sick people and "normal" people, regarding occasional super-normality as the exception; Maslow has shown that super-normality is a great deal commoner than would be supposed; in fact as common as sub-normality. Ordinarily healthy people often experience a sense of intense life-affirmation (which Maslow calls "peak experiences"); and examination o ~ Colin Wilson

Where tradition tells us that people are best kept under control and denied freedom of expression and action, humanistic psychology argues for liberation, more open decision-making and a sharing of power and control. ~ Keith Tudor

Appeasers will always try to get the least dangerous person to bend to the most dangerous person. This is one of the main problems in dysfunctional relationships. The more mature and rational you are the more you are victimized because, they are aware that you're not going to be as aggressive, destructive, or possibly as abusive and so you are the one who has to bend. You're the one who has to change and this constant rapping of rational people's souls around the prickly irrationalities of other people are what appeasers are constantly doing. ~ Stefan Molyneux

The psychology of silk underclothes has not yet been fully considered, mused Miss Pettigrew happily. ~ Winifred Watson

In sum, economists (and those who listened to them) became overconfident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation improves the risk-return trade-off, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful. They forgot about the other models. There was too much Fama, too little Shiller. The economics of the profession may have been fine, but evidently there was trouble with its psychology and sociology. ~ Dani Rodrik

... the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. ~ C. G. Jung

The newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

It is quite true - in fact, obvious on the surface - that the vast majority of dramatic shows and comedies, as well, advocate a liberal and humanistic and relativistic lifestyle and concept. ~ Pat Boone

Economists tell us that the 'price' of an object and its 'value' have very little or nothing to do with one another. 'Value' is entirely subjective economic value, anyway while 'price' reflects whatever a buyer is willing to give up to get the object in question, and whatever the seller is willing to accept to give it up. Both are governed by the Law of Marginal Utility, which is actually a law of psychology, rather than economics. For government to attempt to dictate a 'fair price' betrays complete misunderstanding of the entire process. ~ L. Neil Smith

Many daughters may never have given themselves permission to even 'consider' changing the relationship with their mothers, because they didn't think they had the right to do it. ~ Susan Forward

When a depressed person shrinks away from your touch it does not mean he is rejecting you. Rather he is protecting you from the foul, destructive evil which he believes is the essence of his being and which he believes can injure you. ~ Dorothy Rowe

We should not judge people or try to figure out what makes them tick. We should leave them the hell alone. ~ Marty Rubin

I believe that today we're facing a psychological epidemic, one in which people no longer realize it's okay for things to suck sometimes. ~ Mark Manson

The fear to love reaches sometimes the depth of a panic, resembles sometimes the fear to die. ~ Theodor Reik

Psychology either tends to glorify human beings or trivialize them, leaving out the complexity of the human soul and the demands of God. ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking. ~ William James

Religion, with its metaphysical error of absolute guilt, dominated the broadest, the cosmic realm. From there, it infiltrated the subordinate realms of biological, social and moral existence with its errors of the absolute and inherited guilt. Humanity, split up into millions of factions, groups, nations and states, lacerated itself with mutual accusations. "The Greeks are to blame," the Romans said, and "The Romans are to blame," the Greeks said. So they warred against one another. "The ancient Jewish priests are to blame," the early Christians shouted. "The Christians have preached the wrong Messiah," the Jews shouted and crucified the harmless Jesus. "The Muslims and Turks and Huns are guilty," the crusaders screamed. "The witches and heretics are to blame," the later Christians howled for centuries, murdering, hanging, torturing and burning heretics. It remains to investigate the sources from which the Jesus legend derives its grandeur, emotional power and perseverance.

Let us continue to stay outside this St. Vitus dance. The longer we look around, the crazier it seems. Hundreds of minor patriarchs, self-proclaimed kings and princes, accused one another of this or that sin and made war, scorched the land, brought famine and epidemics to the populations. Later, this became known as "history." And the historians did not doubt the rationality of this history.

Gradually the common people appeared on the scene. "The Queen is to blame," the people's repre ~ Wilhelm Reich

For years I've been interested in a fundamental question concerning what I call the psychology of evil: Why is it that good people do evil deeds? I've been interested in that question since I was a little kid. Growing up in the ghetto in the South Bronx, I had lots of friends who I thought were good kids, but for one reason or another they ended up in serious trouble. They went to jail, they took drugs, or they did terrible things to other people. My whole upbringing was focused on trying to understand what could have made them go wrong. ~ Philip Zimbardo

Dare to be vulnerable, walk outside without your armor on and say YES to your heart. ~ Alaric Hutchinson

In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part. ~ Jeremy Collier

I think my degrees in Theology and Psychology qualified me for nothing, but probably prepared me for everything. ~ Brooke Bida

Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love. ~ Erich Fromm

Inner Peace can be seen as the ultimate benefit of practicing patience. ~ Allan Lokos

When you get scared, embarrassed, angry, nervous, with full of emotion and bad thoughts, remember to maintain your discipline. It earns you respect the more. ~ Auliq Ice

I think the stigma attached to mental illness will disappear just like it did for cancer years ago. ~ Sally Graham

No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the _Iliad_. Good and evil do not exist. ~ Julian Jaynes

We are coming to the times when passive Christianity and passive Christians will cease to exist. There is a maturity, a discipline and a divine militancy coming upon the people of God. Those who have succumbed to humanistic and idealistic theologies may have a hard time with this, but we must understand that God is a military God. The title that he uses ten times more than any other is "the Lord of Hosts", or "Lord of armies". There is a martial aspect to his character that we must understand and embrace for the times and the job to which we are now coming. ~ Rick Joyner

If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible. ~ Boris Sidis

Culture. [...] That most people don't do what we tell them to do. They do what they can get away with. ~ Fredrik Backman

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt. ~ Alan W. Watts

When it is a question of ascertaining whether or not some human act has really taken place, [historians] cannot be too painstaking. If they proceed to the reasons for that act, they are content with the merest appearance, ordinarily founded upon one of those maxims of common-place psychology which are neither more nor less true than their opposites. ~ Marc Bloch

All beliefs are equally valid. ~ Alaric Hutchinson

For me, the good death includes being prepared to die, with my affairs in order, the good and bad messages delivered that need delivering. The good death means dying while I still have my mind sharp and aware; it also means dying without having to endure large amounts of suffering and pain. The good death means accepting death as inevitable, and not fighting it when the time comes. This is my good death, but as legendary psychotherapist Carl Jung said, "It won't help to hear what I think about death." Your relationship to mortality is your own. ~ Caitlin Doughty

Vengeance against predators is meals on wheels. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Ever since the rise of fear in the hominid psyche, one way or another, the grounds for an ever-active anti-fear mechanism was being prepared in the soft soil of consciousness by the process of natural selection. It is a process that deems survival potential as the only measure for existence. And by this measure, the anti-fear, anti-anxiety, anti-depressant mechanism, which later humans named "God", proved to be extremely effective. It delivered solace to the scared psyche of the early humans in their times of utter distress. In the midst of darkness, this one imaginative idea gave them light and hope. ~ Abhijit Naskar

You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, 'A most judicious choice, sire. ~ Steven Kaas

But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind. ~ C. G. Jung

Note that the best rationalizations are those that have an element of truth. Whether you vote or not will almost certainly have no influence on the outcome of an election. Nor will the amount of carbon you personally put into the atmosphere make a difference in the fate of the planet. And perhaps it really should be up to governments rather than the charities that are soliciting your contributions to feed the hungry and homeless in America or save children around the world from crushing poverty and abuse. But the fact that these statements are true doesn't mean they aren't also rationalizations that you and others use to justify questionable behavior.

This uncomfortable truth is crucial to an understanding of the link between rationalization and evil - an understanding that starts with the awareness that sane people rarely, if ever, act in a truly evil manner unless they can successfully rationalize their actions... [The] process of rationalizing evil deeds committed by whole societies is a collective effort rather than a solely individual enterprise. ~ Thomas Gilovich

Human psychology is the most mysterious thing in the world. ~ Munia Khan

Hit your hand on a stone and expect it to hurt. ~ Idries Shah

Expectation works in mysterious ways---and totally unconsciously. ~ Michael Crichton

I'm getting my psychology degree with a focus on marriage and family therapy. ~ Danielle Fishel

In the hands of corrupt citizens democracy gives rise to a corrupt nation. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, how so ever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply removing portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monoto ~ William James