Psychology Quotes

Has it not occurred to you that, conversely, other people do not have your difficulties because they do not react as you do to what happens?

~ Idries Shah

Whatever piece of unconscious we take and work through brings light to humanity.

~ Carl Jung

But just as my philosophy had ceased to interest me as soon as it was formulated into a set of principles so, when I saw myself being imitated, I realised at once what an incubus my aesthetic personality might become if I were to be trapped within it. Imitation changes, not the impersonator, but the impersonated.

~ Peter Ackroyd

Madness is the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in foreign country, able to see and understand everything that's going on around you, but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don't understand the language they speak there. 'We've all felt that.' 'And all of us, one way or another, are mad.

~ Paulo Coelho

The study of psychological trauma has repeatedly led into realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of belief.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

There is a nearly unerring, unconscious radar that zeros in on relationships that repeat our childhood experiences.

~ Joan Borysenko

There is something quite wonderful about sharing a secret.

~ Joyce Rachelle

If you have ever felt slightly nauseous walking through an aged care facility, puckered your face against a smell, observed a grown woman clutching a dolly with desperation, felt a flood of melancholy as death fills your view – then you are in a perfect position to be a supportive psychotherapist for those whose lives are peppered with this everyday.

~ Felicity Chapman

The only way we can revive our memories, if we are willing to ponder about the events that was never discussed for years by looking back at old photos or written texts which gives us a clue about the event we are trying to recall about. If that strategy is accomplished, we will have a clear episodic memory about that particular event that we perceive it as very significant to us.

~ Saaif Alam

I wanted to evaluate my own escape from the crowds in 5 different stages so that I could clarify my thoughts and help my readers get more benefits.(1) Getting away from the media(2) Getting away from the big city(3) Going to nature as a life style(4) Getting away from the social media(5) Being only with people I want

~ Korel Eraybar

I'm not constantly looking for the right in my thoughts. I am, actually, scared of absolute “rights”. Therefore, I don't think my book will appeal to people who seek concrete formulas from me to be happy and who have designed their lives mechanically. But I do believe my book can give something to people who live their lives going from information to information like a bee, who depend on their own syntheses as the outcomes and have flexible thought, and who could be an individual.

~ Korel Eraybar

Getting away from the media was the first step of breaking away from the crowds, and let me clearly state, not in 1 day, 5 days, 10 days but in 4-5 months, I started to feel relief in myself, and I had the ability to think more positively about the things I experienced. I know that there are millions of people around me who believe that following current events and knowing them, as I did once, is an important thing. Besides, I also know that they are the millions of people who have not been able to build their own world yet.

~ Korel Eraybar

The fully human person is in deep and meaningful contact with the world outside of him. He not only listens to himself, but to the voices of the world. The breadth of his own individual experience is infinitely multiplied through a sensitive empathy with others. He suffers with the suffering, rejoices with the joyful. He is born again in every springtime, feels the impact of the great mysteries of life: birth, growth, love, suffering, death. His heart skips along with the 'young lovers', and he knows something of the exhilaration that is in them. He also knows the ghetto's philosophy of despair, the loneliness of suffering without relief, and the bell never tolls without tolling in some strange way for him.

~ John Powell

The true essence of vedanta focuses upon subject rather than object.

~ Pawan Parashar

Healthy brains create a healthy society.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.

~ Erich Fromm

Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people – people they could get rid of.... Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I'm not going to get kicked off the boat, they are. They're always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people... The number of people who want to understand what you're like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat - it's really limited.

~ Elif Batuman

It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.

~ Sam Harris

You don't want to think about it, but there's an ethical limit to what anyone should have to endure. You can't just negate that with sentimentality. With the idea of some indomitable spirit. That's a fairy tale. It's what people say about other people, to avoid the wretchedness. It's just cruelty by other means. Requiring a person to stay alive. For you.

~ Adam Haslett

Complexity is a product of unawareness and simplicity a result of awareness! Uncomplex yourself, Live Life!

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

I believe that even our most abstract and philosophical views spring from an intensely personal base.

~ Carl R. Rogers

All we've got is Now. Life, composed of a billion moments, from our first to our last thoughts.

~ Max Mckeown

It was as if single nights had the duration of centuries, so within that time the most profound alterations in the whole of mankind, in the earth itself and the whole solar system could very well have taken place.

~ Daniel Paul Schreber

In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. Having faith in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change.

~ Erich Fromm

For me ignorant is not illiterate or public, but is trying to review his culture ...You have to run away from them, they did not care what they read, but a number of what they read ...

~ Iridea

Feeling awful is physiological you say.God I hate you, I say. Yes you can find the neurons for feeling awful. Do you think you can find the neurons for the fact I hate you?

~ Alice Notley

The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child.

~ Erich Fromm

The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the thought of one's love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God.

~ Erich Fromm

To be concentrated means to live fully in the present, in the here and now, and not to think of the next thing to be done, while I am doing something right now.

~ Erich Fromm

Modern man thinks he loses something — time — when he does not do things quickly, yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains — except kill it.

~ Erich Fromm

Invisibility can be good as a superpower. But psychiatry reveals people don't like it very much.

~ Joyce Rachelle

The child starts out by being attached to his mother as the ground of all being. He feels helpless and needs the all-enveloping love of mother. He then turns to father as the new center of his affections, father being a guiding principle for thought and action; in this stage he is motivated by the need to acquire father's praise, and to avoid his displeasure. In the stage of full maturity he has freed himself from the person of mother and of father as protecting and commanding powers; he has established the motherly and fatherly principles in himself. He has become his own father and mother; he is father and mother. In the history of the human race we see—and can anticipate—the same development: from the beginning of the love for God as the helpless attachment to a mother Goddess, through the obedient attachment to a fatherly God, to a mature stage where God ceases to be an outside power, where man has incorporated the principles of love and justice into himself, where he has become one with God, and eventually, to a point where he speaks of God only in a poetic, symbolic sense.

~ Erich Fromm

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling—it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?

~ Erich Fromm

Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from the essence of my being—and experience the other person in the essence of his or her being. In essence, all human beings are identical. We are all part of One; we are One.

~ Erich Fromm

The second factor helping to bring the dissociative disorders back into the mainstream was the Vietnam War. For sociological reasons originating outside psychology and psychiatry, the Vietnam War and the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that arose from it were not forgotten when the veterans returned home, as had been the case in the two world wars and the Korean War. The realization that real, severe trauma could have serious long-term psychopathological consequences was forced on society as a whole by Vietnam. Once this principle was accepted, it as a short leap to the conclusion that severe childhood trauma might have serious sequelae lasting into adulthood.

~ Colin A. Ross

Bowlby's conviction that attachment needs continue throughout life and are not outgrown has important implications for psychotherapy. It means that the therapist inevitably becomes an important attachment figure for the patient, and that this is not necessarily best seen as a 'regression' to infantile dependence (the developmental 'train' going into reverse), but rather the activation of attachment needs that have been previously suppressed. Heinz Kohut (1977) has based his 'self psychology' on a similar perspective. He describes 'selfobject needs' that continue from infancy throughout life and comprise an individual's need for empathic responsiveness from parents, friends, lovers, spouses (and therapists). This responsiveness brings a sense of aliveness and meaning, security and self-esteem to a person's existence. Its lack leads to narcissistic disturbances of personality characterised by the desperate search for selfobjects - for example, idealisation of the therapist or the development of an erotic transference. When, as they inevitably will, these prove inadequate (as did the original environment), the person responds with 'narcissistic rage' and disappointment, which, in the absence of an adequate 'selfobject' cannot be dealt with in a productive way.

~ Jeremy Holmes

You're not to achieve anything, on the contrary you are to drop whatever you have accumulated over ages and its difficult mind you, not that its part of you, but YOU have owned this mental clutter unconsciously. The moment you unburden yourself, for the first time YOU ARE!, never before.

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life of his children. But one is bound to fail within oneself and for the children. The former because the problem of existence can be solved by each one only for himself, and not by proxy; the latter because one lacks in the very qualities which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer.

~ Erich Fromm

Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence.Only in this central experience is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love. Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized.

~ Erich Fromm

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