Psychology Quotes

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

~ Martha Gellhorn

Self-talk reflects your innermost feelings.

~ Asa Don Brown

Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not.

~ C.g. Jung

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

~ C.g. Jung

In any kind of relationship we can make the assumption that others know what we think, and we don’t have to say what we want. They are going to do what we want because they know us so well. If they don’t do what we want, what we assume they should do, we feel hurt and think, “How could you do that? You should know.” Again, we make the assumption that the other person knows what we want. A whole drama is created because we make this assumption and then put more assumptions ontop of it.

~ Miguel Ruiz

Whole life is a search for beauty. But, when the beauty is found inside, the search ends and a beautiful journey begins.

~ Harshit Walia

Happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life. They seek position, marriage, reputation, outward success of money, and remain unhappy and neurotic even when they have attained what they were seeking. Such people are usually confined within too narrow a spiritual horizon. Their life has not sufficient content, sufficient meaning. If they are enabled to develop into more spacious personalities, the neurosis generally disappears.

~ C.g. Jung

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic the self-transcendence of human existence. It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, “There is always a day of reckoning.” The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits—ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting.

~ Donald Van De Mark

What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection.

~ Sigmund Freud

If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave.

~ Mo Willems

We are gods with anuses.

~ Ernest Becker

I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.

~ Daniel Keyes

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

~ George Orwell

Our ability to adapt is amazing. Our ability to change isn't quite as spectacular.

~ Lisa Lutz

I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.

~ René Descartes

Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.

~ Criss Jami

Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.

~ Slavoj Žižek

Life's managed, not cured.

~ Phillip C. Mcgraw

Forgiveness is created by the restitution of the abuser, of the wrongdoer. It is not something to be squeeeeeezed out of the victim in a further act of conscience-corrupting abuse.

~ Stefan Molyneux

I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

You cannot connect with anyone except through reality.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Awkward silences rule the world. People are so terrified of awkward silences that they will literally go to war rather than face an awkward silence.

~ Stefan Molyneux

If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.

~ Shannon L. Alder

There is no key to open the heart of another - except curiosity.

~ Stefan Molyneux

When people have invested their identities into clichés, the only counter argument they have is 'being offended'.

~ Stefan Molyneux

We are supposed to call poison medicine and we wonder why we're always sick.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Knowledge is responsibility, which is why people resist knowledge.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

What we do not confront, we inhabit.What we do not reject, we accept.What we do not fight, we become.

~ Stefan Molyneux

One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes’ argument “I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The toxic behaviors were there before you decided to enter into relationships with them. The signs were there. You may have chosen to look the other way, but the signs were there.—Psychotherapist from Type 1 Sociopath

~ P.a. Speers

The ruling classes use broken and smashed up childhoods as weaponised instruments of domination around the world. This is why the government has no incentive to end child abuse, because the government needs abuse victims as enforcers.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Guilt is a feeling that you owe a debt that you're not paying.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Irrational expectations are at the root of most human suffering.

~ Stefan Molyneux

We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent — people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.

~ Erich Fromm

There is no part of one’s beliefs about oneself which cannot be modified by sufficiently powerful psychological techniques. There is nothing about oneself which cannot be taken away or changed. The proper stimuli can, if correctly applied, turn communists into fascists, saints into devils, the meek into heroes, and vice-versa. There is no sovereign sanctuary within ourseles which represents our real nature. There is nobody at home in the internal fortress. Everything we cherish as our ego, everything we believe in, is just what we have cobbled together out of the accident of our birth and subsequent experiences. With drugs, brainwashing, and other techniques of extreme persuasion, we can quite readily make a man a devotee of a different ideology, the patriot of a different country, or the follower of a different religion.

~ Peter J. Carroll