Psychology Quotes

There are some people you like immediately, some whom you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp stick.

~ Douglas Adams

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.

~ C.g. Jung

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

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

~ Kay Redfield Jamison

We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win.

~ Douglas Adams

All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.

~ Ken Kesey

Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.

~ Megan Whalen Turner

If you discovered something that made you tighten inside, you had better try to learn more about it.

~ Nicholas Sparks

Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event.

~ C.g. Jung

I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present normal self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.

~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Where does a thought go when it's forgotten?

~ Sigmund Freud

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.

~ C.g. Jung

When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.

~ Criss Jami

A life that is burdened with expectations is a heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment.

~ Douglas Adams

It is always assumed by the empty-headed, who chatter about themselves for want of something better, that people who do not discuss their affairs openly must have something to hide.

~ Honoré De Balzac

An intelligent person can rationalize anything, a wise person doesn't try.

~ Jen Knox

When good people consider you the bad guy, you develop a heart to help the bad ones. You actually understand them.

~ Criss Jami

We're always contradicting ourselves.We want people to tell us apart.......yet we don't want them to be able to.We want people to get to know us......but we also want them to keep their distance.We've always longed for someone to accept us...But we never believed there'd be anyone who would accept our twisted ways.That's why we'll stay locked up tight......in our own little private world......and throw away the key, so that no one can ever hurt us.

~ Bisco Hatori

Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.

~ Douglas Adams

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

~ William Gibson

A person can't change all at once.

~ Stephen King

No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

~ Irvin D. Yalom

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

~ Saul Bellow

Through others we become ourselves.

~ Lev S. Vygotsky

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

~ Edward L. Bernays

Man is many things, but he is not rational.

~ Oscar Wilde

Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.

~ Richard Adams

Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.

~ Charles Dickens

It's not that there is no small talk...It's that it comes not at the beginning of conversations but at the end...Sensitive people...'enjoy small talk only after they've gone deep' says Strickland. 'When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.

~ Susan Cain

People who need to bully you are the easiest to push around.

~ Douglas Adams

In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past

~ Alan Moore

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

It was his subconscious which told him this---that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.

~ Douglas Adams

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

~ Graham Greene

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

~ Margaret Atwood

Rather than arriving five hours late and flustered, it would be better all around if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.

~ Douglas Adams

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

~ John Berger

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.

~ Thomas Hardy