Psychology Quotes

It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. ~ Leo Tolstoy

It's better not to hold your feelings inside too much and express them to a dear one freely, than to pay thousands of dollars to a psychiatrist for the same outburst of emotions later. Emotions are a bonding mechanism for humans. So, use 'em, abuse 'em and utilize 'em. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I really like to discover a new culture, a new country, a new rhythm of living. I really, really like that. I think that's the most enriching thing, for my nature, because I like the psychology of people. ~ Audrey Tautou

The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color. In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward. ~ Aberjhani

Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. Aesthetics and economics, technology and psychology are intrinsically related to the process. ~ Paul Rand

He wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'. ~ Oliver Sacks

Genes and education are fundamental building blocks with witch man develops personality and lifestyle in one way or other... ~ Monica Rus Carmen Psychologyst

We were supposed to survive together. We were supposed to leave and live and grow old together. But instead, his death is a sacrifice for my life, a life I no longer want. ~ Halo Scot

For once, I'd love if someone reacted unpredictably to death. Chant or somersault or fucking yodel to show me you have a mind of your own. ~ Halo Scot

Freud expressed the opinion - not quite in earnest, though, it seemed to me - that philosophy was the most decent form of sublimation of repressed sexuality, nothing more. In response I put the question, 'What then is science, particularly psychoanalytic psychology?' Whereupon he, visible a bit surprised, answered evasively: 'At least psychology has a social purpose. ~ Ludwig Binswanger

Why we ask questions: Questions are the basis of human freedom. Our mind, as a part of our self experience, is curious and always challenging that part of us that can think about the essence of things. We interpret our lives all the time - with unconscious deep conceptualization - and these conceptualization raise questions.
Why did I feel the way I felt yesterday when I spoke with X? What is the meaning of my answer? Why I chose to spend time in X's company and not Y's? And how it changed my attitude toward Y?
(Interesting paragraph I translated from the Hebrew edition) ~ Christopher Bollas

Our emotions affect the atmosphere around us, and other people, because emotions influence the electromagnetic field our heart emits. ~ Sam Owen

More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience. ~ Antonio Damasio

Today, Islam effectively resists secularization primarily because of its use of shame. Within the community, each person's sexuality is tied to his or her family and to the community. To violate the sexual rules of Allah violates both the family and the community. This powerful distortion allows Islam to remain isolated from secular sexual influences. The terror of social sanction or violence keeps young people from following their heart. It prevents healthy sexual exploration and development in men and women. ~ Darrel Ray

Neuroscience in no longer simply the science of the nervous system. It is the actual empirical science of self-awareness. ~ Abhijit Naskar

It is not what we do but how we feel doing what we do that matters. ~ Abdulazeez Henry Musa

No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along. ~ Cus D'Amato

I am tempted to find reason and justice in the fact that he died as violently and indecently as he lived. But that is too ingenuous a way out. It does not explain Dimitrios; it only apologizes for him. Special sorts of conditions must exist for the creation of the special sort of criminal that he typified ... all I do know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, those conditions will obtain. ~ Eric Ambler

Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. ~ Charles Darwin

As a sign of utmost gratitude for his contributions to the Indian society in restoring equal rights of the citizens, I confer him (B.R. Ambedkar) the title "Martin Luther King Jr. of India. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The problem in our society is the ego psychology and conventional wisdom about "look out for #1." That conventional wisdom thinks that "love your enemy" is to some a principle no one can ever live by. ~ Robert Thurman

We need leadership books that offer information as well as inspiration. Pop leadership is one of the most destructive forces today. ~ Paul Gibbons

When people are unable to integrate their traumatic memories, they seem to lose their capacity to assimilate new experiences as well. It is as if their personality stops at a certain points and cannot enlarge any more by the addition or assimilation of new elements. Unless they become aware of the split off elements and integrate them into a story that had happened in the past but was now over, they would experience a slow decline in their personal and professional functioning. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother. ~ Martha Gellhorn

Age is a number that doesn't reflect circumstance, environment or psychology. ~ Krista Ritchie

No matter where or what, there are makers, takers, and fakers. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

History, Geology, Psychology, Philosophy, Chemistry, Physics, Theology, Mathematics, Technology, Sociology, Biology, and the list goes on and on. If all this body of knowledge exist for human consumption, why would I specialize in only one field? ~ Allan Amanyire

Marginalised and abused children are often overlooked even today, and risk becoming marginalised and abused adults who may never receive acknowledgment or respect for the immense physical and emotional burden they carry from childhood or indeed have their full potential realised. ~ Jane Hersey

[Skinner] does not invoke other events, processes, or mechanisms which are hypothesized or invented for the purpose of mediating between behavior and its empirical determinants. This omission is sometimes misconstrued as a denial that mediating mechanisms exist; they obviously do, they are obviously neurological and they are also obviously themselves lawful. ...The argument [against employing them as part of scientific practice] is simplicity itself... [Skinner] considers such theoretical terms unnecessary; they may generate research whose only usefulness is to disconfirm the mediating entity or redefine it without increasing our knowledge of behavior's controlling variables; they can become the absorbing focus of an inquiry and so deflect attention from behavior itself; they can become a "refuge from the data". ~ Kenneth MacCorquodale

Whatever is going on inside your head has everything to do with how well you end up performing. ~ D.C. Gonzalez

I've begun to realize that behind every story there is a gap that nourishes wisdom with great strength. And people misunderstand it as the end. ~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

A very important function of intelligence is the ability to premeditate. ~ Aarush Kashyap ~ Kirtida Gautam

A psychologist said to me, there are only two important questions you have to ask yourself. What do you really feel? And, what do you really want? If you can answer those two, you probably can leave your neuroses behind you. ~ Harold Ramis

We are parts of one universe, true enough. We stand within an almost infinite network of relationships. Yet each of us is a single point of consciousness, a unique event, a private, unrepeatable world. This is the essence of our aloneness. ~ Nathaniel Branden

My brother is nine years older than I am. He's a psychology professor, I'm an actor, and so we look at life in two different ways. We thought it would be interesting to come together and take our unique perspectives and share them with everybody else. ~ Matt Czuchry

Suicidal thoughts, you keep me company on the dark days. ~ Steven Magee

Worldview is often confused with perception; rather, it is our perception that influences our worldview. ~ Asa Don Brown

Psychology doesn't like to talk about evil. It likes to talk about bad childhoods. But I very much believe that some people are evil and motivation is not necessary for evil. ~ Laura Schlessinger

when you are in pain __ no one can feel this better than you .this is not a shame to be in emotional pain.you love someone or hate __ not in your hand . a part of life to going through pain. pain may cause silent killer of your health .
what you must do _ focus on your pain .realizing helps . then you would feel at a point _you have to get out of it. then the moment you focus what can destruct your emotional pain .music ,screaming ,going out,writing, anything ,you may pick up.
one last thing __ never lie to self. shoot direct question and answer to self . create hobbies .
then focus on yourself. look how brilliant you are . how unique you are . then admit ,no power can hurt you so much that has nothing to do with your well being . now _ reject . start to reject . once you understand your pain, the cause , how to keep self safety , ___you are powerful to reject pain slowly . ~ Litymunshi

Bowlby uses the notion of faulty internal working models to describe different patterns of neurotic attachment. He sees the basic problem of 'anxious attachment" as that of maintaining attachment with a care-giver who is unpredictable or rejecting. Here the internal working model will be based not on accurate representation of the self and others, but on coping, in which the care-giver must be accommodated to. The two basic strategies here are those of avoidance or adherence, which lead to avoidant or ambivalent attachment. ~ Jeremy Holmes

Psychologist: "This, ah, is a new sort of, ah, psychopathology that we're only now beginning to, ah, understand. These, ah, super-serial killers have no, ah, 'type' but, ah, rather consider everyone to be their 'type.'"
Gramma: "Did you hear that? Your daddy's a superhero! ~ Barry Lyga

Many Christians ... find themselves defeated by the most psychological weapon that Satan uses against them. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-esteem. Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth This feeling shackles many Christians, in spite of wonderful spiritual experiences and knowledge of God's Word. Although they understand their position as sons and daughters of God, they are tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling inferiority, and chained to a deep sense of worthlessness. ~ David A. Seamands

Being your authentic self exudes a quiet confidence. ~ Sam Owen

The universe, it appeared, had never been kind to Captain Bortrek, conspiring against him in a fashion that Threepio privately considered unlikely given the man's relative unimportance. Knowing what he did about the Alderaan social structure, shipping regulations, the psychology of law enforcement agents, and the statistical behavior patterns of human females, Threepio was much inclined to doubt that so many hundreds of people would spend that much time thinking up ways to thwart and injure a small-time free-trader who was, by his own assertion, only trying to make a living. ~ Barbara Hambly

The curious thing about The Ring and the Book, to which I will now return, is that although each character recounts the same events, and although there is no difference in what they tell, there is a fundamental difference, which belongs to the realm of human psychology, the fact that each of us believes we are justified. For example, the count admits he is a murderer, but the word "murderer" is too general. We know this from reading other books. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Q. Surely it is easier to be objective about other people than about oneself?
A. No, it is more difficult. If you become objective to yourself you can see other people objectively, but not before, because before that it will all be coloured by your own views, attitudes, tastes, by what you like and what you dislike. To be objective you must be free from it all. You can become objective to yourself in the state of self-consciousness: this is the first experience of coming into contact with the real object. ~ P.D. Ouspensky

Hope is an elixir of life. It is the engine that propels us forward in our pursuit of countless goals, all of which might otherwise be impossible to undertake if we were bereft of hope. ~ Gad Saad

The greatest mistake in the treatment of diseases is that there are physicians for the body and physicians for the soul, although the two cannot be separated. ~ Plato

Because of language, the thoughts we record today might reach into the future to influence the thinking of people not yet born. ~ Laura A. Freberg

As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. ~ C. G. Jung

How many friends would you have if you went from one to another asking them to conceal a dead body? ~ Idries Shah

We know that hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games. ~ Fred Shero

I think she must have lived where all the sad poets live, in that secret place where everything hurts all the time. ~ Ross Thomas

Only those person who learned to like themselves can be generous and friendly with others. ~ Les Giblin

If you believe all those who are urging you to give up are wrong, prove them wrong! ~ Nabil N. Jamal

Studying Theology doesn't make you religious any more than studying Psychology makes you crazy. ~ Ashley Chappell

I am not a human being enjoying a spiritual life, I am a spiritual being enjoying a human life. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

That these mandates exist is hardly news, but their cumulative effect on women's lives tends to be examined through a fragmented lens, one-pathology-at-a-time, the eating disorder lit on the self-help shelves separated from the books on women's troubled relationships with men, the books on compulsive shopping separated from the books on female sexuality, the books on culture and media separated from the books on female psychology. Take your pick, choose your demon: Women Who Love Too Much in one camp, Women Who Eat Too Much in another, Women Who Shop Too Much in a third. In fact, the camps are not so disparate, and the question of appetite - specifically the question of what happens to the female appetite when it's submerged and rerouted - is the thread that binds them together. One woman's tub of cottage cheese is another's maxed-out MasterCard; one woman's soul-murdering love affair is another's frenzied eating binge. ~ Caroline Knapp

The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy ~ Abraham Maslow

While much psychology emphasizes the familial causes of angst in humans, the cultural component carries as much weight, for culture is the family of the family. If the family of the family has various sicknesses, then all families within that culture will have to struggle with the same malaises. There is a saying cultura cura, culture cures. If the culture is a healer, the families learn how to heal; they will struggle less, be more reparative, far less wounding, far more graceful and loving. In a culture where the predator rules, all new life needing to be born, all old life needing to be gone, is unable to move and the soul-lives of its citizenry are frozen with both fear and spiritual famine. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

But the trouble with asking your subconscious what it wants is, it just laughs at you and says, 'Work it out for yourself, moron. ~ Sophie Kinsella

Researchers surf the wave of human imagination. ~ Steven Magee

We know more about the lives of celebrities, than the truth hidden in our wars. ~ Efrat Cybulkiewicz

There is more mental health cure found in a pile of dirt than in all the behavioral therapy and drugs in modern medical science. ~ J.S.B. Morse

Ah, lust! How one would like to make it the cornerstone of self! But I wouldn't go ahead and build on it if I were you. ~ Elfriede Jelinek

He feels the need to hear a human voice - a fully human voice like his own. Sometimes he laughs like a hyena or roars like a lion - his idea of a hyena his idea of a lion. ~ Margaret Atwood

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

One of my favorite classes was horror in theater and psychology. ~ Annie Parisse

I consider therapy successful when the family members (or individual clients) have discovered ways to get what they need from their relationships with the people in their lives, so that their relationship with me is no longer necessary to sustain them. Like a chemical catalyst that facilitates a reaction between two other substances, the therapeutic relationship catalyzes the transformation of relationships in the lives of clients. But the real healing takes place not in the therapeutic relationship but in the client's relationships with significant others. ~ Joseph A. Micucci

There is machinery in the mind that is consciousness. Knowing the machine is the dawn of a new era. ~ Allan Wesler

The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health. ~ Stefan Molyneux

It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned ... You're alone when you're learning. But you always use it on other people. It's different when there are other people involved. ~ Chaim Potok

The distortion of relationship which says "I disagree with you, so I must destroy you" leaves us as Black people with basically uncreative victories, defeated in any common struggle. This jugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertion or affirmation of self is an attack upon my self - or that my defining myself will somehow prevent or retard your self-definition. ~ Audre Lorde

I do not see why the axiom of Prudence should not be questioned, when it conflicts with present inclination, on a ground similar to that on which Egoists refuse to admit the axiom of Rational Benevolence. If the Utilitarian has to answer the question, 'Why should I sacrifice my own happiness for the greater happiness of another?' it must surely be admissible to ask the Egoist 'Why should I sacrifice a present pleasure for a greater one in the future? Why should I concern myself about my own future feelings any more than about the feelings of other persons?' ~ Henry Sidgwick

Inspirational Psychology brings peace and choice to life even in the most difficult of situations. ~ Lee L Jampolsky

I think it was Lessing who once said, 'There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose'. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Writing is a series of verbal suggestions designed to provoke a psychological reaction and an aesthetic experience. ~ Stewart Stafford

I'm not here to disagree with people or try to change anyone's mind. I'm just here to accept and love others right where they are – no matter their belief systems or backgrounds. ~ Alaric Hutchinson

Yakov spent the whole day playing his fiddle; when it got completely dark, he took the notebook in which he recorded his losses daily, and out of boredom began adding up the yearly total. It came to over a thousand roubles. This astounded him so much that he flung the abacus to the floor and stamped his feet. Then he picked up the abacus, again clicked away for a long time, and sighed deeply and tensely. His face was purple and wet with sweat. He thought that if he could have put that lost thousand roubles in the bank, he would have earned at least forty roubles a year in interest. And therefore those forty roubles were a loss. In short, wherever you turned, there was nothing but losses everywhere.
- Rothchild's Fiddle ~ Anton Chekhov

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes. ~ David Chalmers

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything
evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing
it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing. ~ Michael Crichton

The Soviet government sprouted and grew out of the habits, the psychology, and the condition of the Russian people. It fitted them. They understand it. ~ Lincoln Steffens

The virtues developed here in the age range [around the age of 2] of are trust or faith, and will power and self determination according to the Erickson model. The existential questions being addressed here in this stage are, can one trust the world? and, is it alright to be myself? ~ Leviak B. Kelly

Do not allow yourself to be bogged down by negative thinking. ~ Asa Don Brown

What undercuts the power of women's anger in the end is not the melancholy that Butler charts, but material realities - economics, not psychology. While Em fantasizes about the possibility of Afro- and Euro-Jamaican women building partnerships to work for each other, she seems to understand that she has no concrete possibilities for realizing this fantasy in 1920s Jamaica. ~ Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions. ~ Steven Pinker

The result of this one-sided patriarchal stance, demonstrable in all areas of life, is an un integrated man who is attacked by his repressed side and often enough overwhelmed by it. This transpires not only in the fate of the individual man as seduction by a "lower" anima, but equally through seduction by a compensatory ideology, for example materialism, to which "spirit" men are especially susceptible.
The man wants to remain exclusively masculine and out of fear rejects the transformative contact with a woman of equal status. Negativizing the Feminine in the patriarchate prevents the man from experiencing woman as a thou of equal but different status, and hence from coming to terms with her. The consequence of the patriarchal male's haughtiness toward women leads to the inability to make any genuine contact with the Feminine, i.e., not only in a real woman but also with the Feminine in himself, the unconscious. Whenever an integral relationship to the Feminine remains undeveloped, however, this means that, due to his fear, the male is unable to break through to his own wholeness that also embraces the Feminine. Thus the patriarchal culture's separation from the Feminine and from the unconscious becomes one of the essential causes for the crisis of fear in which the patriarchal world now finds itself. ~ Erich Neumann

Sometimes when a person is not being heard, it is appropriate to blame him or her. Perhaps he or she is speaking obscurely; perhaps he is claiming too much; perhaps she is speaking rather too personally. And one can, perhaps, charge Spielrein on all three counts. But, on balance, her inability to win recognition for her insight into repression was not her fault; it was Freud's and Jung's. Preoccupied with their own theories, and with each other, the two men simply did not pause even to take in the ideas of this junior colleague let alone to lend a helping hand in finding a more felicitous expression for her thought. More ominously still, both men privately justified their disregard by implicitly casting her once more into the role of patient, as though that role somehow precluded a person from having a voice or a vision of his or her own. It was and remains a damning comment on how psychoanalysis was evolving that so unfair a rhetorical maneuver, one so at odds with the essential genius of the new therapeutic method, came so easily to hand. In the great race between Freud and Jung to systematize psychoanalytic theory, to codify it once and for all, a simpler truth was lost sight of: Sometimes a person is not heard because she is not listened to. ~ John Kerr

Without confidence we feel insecure. We replay the doubting voices of our parents on a loop in our own minds. ~ Steven Franssen

Vonnegut was talking," I say today, "about the psychic effects of trauma." There's a sentence of Alice Miller's looping in my mind, about grandiose people and depressives, Narcissus and Echo: "Neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact." It's the main thing I've learned from reading all this psychology: the future is always trying to feel like the past. When it does, it feels like selfishness, hurt, loss at the hands of others. The trick is to let it empty. Maybe this is another way to come unstuck in time. ~ Kristin Dombek

Saadi: Be a true renouncer, (zahid) and [you can even] ware satin. ~ Idries Shah

Breathless and unharmed, we emerge from the mazes of metaphysics and psychology where man and the soul are playing hide-and-seek. ~ Ameen Rihani

But I majored in Drama, modified with Psychology. ~ Rachel Dratch

There is a growing body of work coming out of psychology and cognitive science that says you have no clue why you act the way you do, choose the things you choose, or think the thoughts you think. Instead, you create narratives, little stories to explain away why you gave up on that diet, why you prefer Apple over Microsoft, why you clearly remember it was Beth who told you the story about the clown with the peg leg made of soup cans when it was really Adam, and it wasn't a clown. ~ David McRaney

How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole ~ C. G. Jung

Definitions from Mulla Do-Piaza
Emotionalist:
A man or woman who thinks he has experienced the divine. ~ Idries Shah

We study humans to give them a healthier and happier life. ~ Abhijit Naskar

It's one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we're alive when we're reminded we're going to die, ~ Tim Kreider

A mind is a terrible thing; waste it. ~ Brad Blanton

Traditionally, psychology has been the study of two populations: university freshmen and white rats. ~ Paul Bloom