Psychology Quotes

It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.

~ Brené Brown

To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is.

~ C.g. Jung

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.

~ John Ruskin

I am a lover of what is, not because I'm a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.

~ Byron Katie

Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.

~ Wilhelm Reich

In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

~ Thomas Szasz

Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes... Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

The woman knows from living with the abusive man that there are no simple answers. Friends say: “He’s mean.” But she knows many ways in which he has been good to her. Friends say: “He treats you that way because he can get away with it. I would never let someone treat me that way.” But she knows that the times when she puts her foot down the most firmly, he responds by becoming his angriest and most intimidating. When she stands up to him, he makes her pay for it—sooner or later. Friends say: “Leave him.” But she knows it won’t be that easy. He will promise to change. He’ll get friends and relatives to feel sorry for him and pressure her to give him another chance. He’ll get severely depressed, causing her to worry whether he’ll be all right. And, depending on what style of abuser he is, she may know that he will become dangerous when she tries to leave him. She may even be concerned that he will try to take her children away from her, as some abusers do.

~ Lundy Bancroft

The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.

~ Wilhelm Reich

Most of you guys can't see the potential in a nervous breakdown. A real collapse. There's more chance of finding yourself in a major depression than there is in a bottle Prozac.

~ Keith Ablow

But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things.

~ Agatha Christie

Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable, it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.

~ Steven Pinker

Trauma does not have to occur by abuse alone...

~ Asa Don Brown

Miss Leefolt sigh, hang up the phone like she just don't know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons.

~ Kathryn Stockett

He's the sort of guy that gets a laugh out of people.

~ Ken Kesey

Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can kill you.

~ Philip G. Zimbardo

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

~ Irvin D. Yalom

Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

~ Abraham H. Maslow

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?

~ Margaret Mead

Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?

~ Natalie Angier

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

~ Stanley Milgram

Our deepest wounds surround our greatest gifts.

~ Ken Page

Psychology cannot tell people how they ought to live their lives. It can however, provide them with the means for effecting personal and social change.

~ Albert Bandura

The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it's been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing.... I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I'm comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind.

~ David Sedaris

Daniel supposed he had a secret life. Most people did, it was hardly possible to live without one.

~ P.d. James

Like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment.

~ Ian Fleming

Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more willpower or drive, but because they know productivity is a game played against a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty that can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push-ups.

~ David Mcraney

I explain to my patients that abused children often find it hard to disentangle themselves from their dysfunctional families, whereas children grow away from good, loving parents with far less conflict. After all, isn't that the task of a good parent, to enable the child to leave home?

~ Irvin D. Yalom

It is naive to think that self-assertiveness is easy. To live self-assertively--which means to live authentically--is an act of high courage. That is why so many people spend the better part of their lives in hiding--from others and also from themselves.

~ Nathaniel Branden

As adults, we hvae many inhibitions against crying. We feel it is an expression of weakness, or femininity or of childishness. The person who is afraid to cry is afraid of pleasure. This is because the person who is afraid to cry holds himself together rigidly so that he won't cry; that is, the rigid person is as afraid of pleasure as he is afraid to cry. In a situation of pleasure he will become anxious. As his tensions relax he will begin to tremble and shake, and he will attempt to control this trembling so as not to break down in tears. His anxiety is nothing more than the conflict between his desire to let go and his fear of letting go. This conflict will arise whenever the pleasure is strong enough to threaten his rigidity.Since rigidity develops as a means to block out painful sensations, the release of rigidity or the restoration of the natural motility of the body will bring these painful sensations to the fore. Somewhere in his unconscious the neurotic individual is aware that pleasure can evoke the repressed ghosts of the past. It could be that such a situation is responsible for the adage No pleasure without pain.

~ Alexander Lowen

The process of dissociation is an elegant mechanism built into the human psychological system as a form of escape from (sometimes literally) going crazy. The problem with checking out so thoroughly is that it can leave us feeling dead inside, with little or no ability to feel our feelings in our bodies. The process of repair demands a re-association with the body, a commitment to dive into the body and feel today what we couldn’t feel yesterday because it was too dangerous.

~ Alexandra Katehakis

A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

~ Lev S. Vygotsky

The point is to be free, not to be crazy.

~ Tsoknyi Rinpoche

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.

~ Keith Ablow

How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense—if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example—then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain.

~ Jonah Lehrer

The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation.

~ Criss Jami

A weakling is incapable of sincerity.

~ François De La Rochefoucauld

The stone has no uncertainties, no urge to communicate, and is eternally the same for thousands of years, while I am only a passing phenomenon which bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.

~ C.g. Jung