Psychology Quotes

As for the boys...vulnerable fathers turn to time-honored defensive responses to maintain the function that father knows best' Parents, especially fathers, teach their sons to obey authority no matter what.

~ Martha Stout

Our actions speak for us & they speak loudly.

~ Allan Lokos

The [character-]armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature.The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in material but in spiritual things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature.Both the mechanist and the mystic stand inside the limits and conceptual laws of a civilization which is ruled by a contradictory and murderous mixture of machines and gods. This civilization forms the mechanistic-mystical structures of men, and the mechanistic-mystical character structures keep reproducing a the mechanistic-mystical civilization. Both mechanists and mystics find themselves inside the framework of human structure in a civilization conditioned by mechanistics and mysticism. They cannot grasp the basic problems of this civilization because their thinking and philosophy correspond exactly to the condition they project and continue to reproduce. In order to realize the power of mysticism, one has only to think of the murderous conflict between Hindus and Muslims at the time India was divided. To comprehend what mechanistic civilization means, think of the age of the atom bomb.

~ Wilhelm Reich

Praise & esteem can feel good, which is fine, but don't look to them for inner peace & lasting happiness.

~ Allan Lokos

Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence.

~ Sharon Salzberg

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

We are all in this together. Our happiness inextricably is tied to that of all beings.

~ Allan Lokos

There is no divinity achieved unless the individual mind submits itself to a mind supposed supreme. The Bible in its simplest form is simply that—a book. When you give it your mind it becomes powerful.

~ Dew Platt

We can understand the inherent radiance & purity of our minds by understanding metta. Like the mind, metta is not distorted by what it encounters.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Although social and personal circumstances will play their part in contributing to how an individual suffers, in Buddhist thought blame is seen as a poison that will only lead to negative actions and will do nothing to reduce suffering.

~ Desmond Biddulph

When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life.

~ Sharon Salzberg

People in the midst of losing their patience are certainly experiencing as aspect of dukkha.

~ Allan Lokos

When the only answer a little girl ever receives is no, from her parents or her teachers or her world, at some point she stops asking for what she wants. She begins to expect nothing, so as not to be disappointed when that exactly what she gets. But, it turns out, I do have wants.

~ Laura Fitzgerald

Though the 'Thou' is not an 'It', it is also not another 'I'. He who treats a person as another 'I' does not really see that person but only a projected image of himself. Such a relation, despite the warmest personal feeling is really 'I'-'It'.

~ Mauric Friedman

Denial is a useful defense mechanism until it's not.

~ Rosalind Kaplan

We live in a society that shuns guilt, hardly knows it. It is drummed into us: Don't feel guilty. No one wants to pay the price of reconciliation, of atonement, of forgiveness.

~ Robert Dykstra

Mathilde made an effort to use the more intimate form; she was evidently more attentive to this unusual way of speaking than to what she was saying. This use of the singular form, stripped of the tone of affection, ceased, after a moment, to afford Julien any pleasure, he was astonished at the absence of happiness; finally, in order to feel it, he had recourse to his reason. He saw himself highly esteemed by this girl who was so proud, and never bestowed unrestricted praise; by this line of reasoning he arrived at a gratification of his self-esteem.

~ Stendhal

Obviously, there must be some connection between the subordination of actual individuals and the grotesque exaltation of symbolic ones like Kim Il Sung.

~ Christopher Hitchens

If a man felt hostility and aversion, but saw that he had poor or no grounds for his feeling, the remedy was to look for good or at least better grounds--a search hid predisposing thoughts would help him in.

~ James Gould Cozzens

The Elsinore's bow tilted skyward while her stern fell into a foaming valley. Not a man had gained his feet. Bridge and men swept back toward me and fetched up against the mizzen-shrouds. And then that prodigious, incredible old man appeared out of the water, on his two legs, upright, dragging with him, a man in each hand, the helpless forms of Nancy and the Faun. My heart leapt at beholding this mighty figure of a man-killer and slave-driver, it is true, but who sprang first into the teeth of danger so that his slaves might follow, and who emerged with a half-drowned slave in either hand.I knew augustness and pride as I gazed--pride that my eyes were blue, like his; that my skin was blond, like his; that my place was aft with him, and with the Samurai, in the high place of government and command. I nearly wept with the chill of pride that was akin to awe and that tingled and bristled along my spinal column and in my brain. As for the rest--the weaklings and the rejected, and the dark-pigmented things, the half-castes, the mongrel-bloods, and the dregs of long-conquered races--how could they count? My heels were iron as I gazed on them in their peril and weakness. Lord! Lord! For ten thousand generations and centuries we had stamped upon their faces and enslaved them to the toil of our will.

~ Jack London

...American psychology effectively guaranteed its place as a cultural icon by helping to create the pathologies it simultaneously promised to treat. (p. 37)

~ Alvin Dueck

This has suggested to some that the very structure of human thought is oppositional-that is to say, rational and associative, rather than linear and categorical.

~ Marcel Danesi

There is no crime in anyone’s blood any more than there is goodness in the blood of others. Criminals are not born. They are made by hunger, want and injustice.

~ Khuswant Singh

Under the guise of helping the sick, oppressed and hopeless, psychiatry is paving the way for authoritarian governments to suppress a whole society furthermore, with drugs and obscene practices that promote, not only hypnotic suggestions, but also highly suggestible individuals which, otherwise, would oppose a whole repressive system that threatens both their existence and the existence of future generations on Earth. And so, one can very well say that, psychiatry, aided by pharmaceutical corporations and power-driven governments, or merely governments fearful of their own people and the extinction of immoral politics, will contribute vastly to the extermination and full extinction of the human race.

~ Robin Sacredfire

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

~ Stewart Stafford

Introspection does not need to be a still life. It can be an active alchemy.

~ Anaïs Nin

Feelings are what you experience when you try to access the immeasurable.

~ Steven Paglierani

How might it feel to be fully present in every moment all of the time?

~ Joyce Rachelle

As I'd seen over and again, people who see themselves as victims sometimes don't notice when they become oppressors.

~ Souad Mekhennet

Every man is a poet at heart.

~ Sigmund Freud

This concept upends the way most people think about their subjective experienceof life. We tend to place a lot of emphasis on our circumstances, assuming that whathappens to us (or fails to happen) determines how we feel. From this perspective, thesmall-scale details of how you spend your day aren’t that important, because whatmatters are the large-scale outcomes, such as whether or not you get a promotion ormove to that nicer apartment. According to Gallagher, decades of research contradictthis understanding. Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we payattention to. If you focus on a cancer diagnosis, you and your life become unhappy anddark, but if you focus instead on an evening martini, you and your life become morepleasant—even though the circumstances in both scenarios are the same. As Gallaghersummarizes: “Who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum ofwhat you focus on.

~ Cal Newport

You turn words, you deceive people.

~ Alex Sebastianutti

The abnegation of empathy in the case of something as complex and variable as sexual taste is a dangerous thing. The particular misfortune of the paedophile is not that he is a walking manifestation of evil but that his or her sexual development (as much subject to nature, nurture and questions of identity as any of ours) has resulted in a potentially very harmful and unacceptable attraction. We rightly call it a disorder because of these damaging effects, but merely reacting with horror will do little towards solving a complex and difficult issue stemming from a sexual drive as real and compulsive as any of us are used to.

~ Derren Brown

Half of life is lost in charming others.The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others.Leave this play. You have played enough.

~ Rumi

Everyone can be corrupted, even the great and the good.

~ Mark Dysan

The Goth boy stares at me, and I give him a what-are-you-looking-at stare right back. “I’m dead,” he says in a dull monotone. “Pardon me?” Adriana asks, but he keeps staring at me. “You’re dead, too. Look at your veins. They’re blue.” He points at my forearms where dark veins run their lengths. “You’re rotting like me.” I glance to Adriana, hands clasped and praying that she won’t leave me here. Adriana’s stopped crying now and squints at the boy before standing to pull closed the curtain that rings my cot. “Crazy,” she says with an uncertain smile. “You’re not rotting.” . . . ninety-nine, one hundred . “No,” I reply. “But I will if you leave me here.

~ Michael F. Stewart

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

~ Marty Rubin

We shouldn't judge people or try to figure out what makes them tick. We should just leave them the hell alone.

~ Marty Rubin

Jealousy is projected self-pity.

~ Kevin Focke

Invalidating someone else is not merely disagreeing with something that the other person said. It is a process in which individuals communicate to another that the opinions and emotions of the target are invalid, irrational, selfish, uncaring, stupid, most likely insane, and wrong, wrong, wrong. Invalidators let it be known directly or indirectly that their targets views and feelings do not count for anything to anybody at any time or in any way.

~ David M. Allen