Psychology Quotes

The desire to understand is almost synonymous with the desire to simplify, and it is closely bound up with the desire for certainty - for assurance. But, when we find we have over-simplified, this does not necessarily imply that our conclusions are wrong. It implies merely that they are less right than we thought, or that we have exaggerated their comprehensiveness.

~ Rupert Crawshay-Williams

It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.

~ George Orwell

But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing class-distinctions away. More exactly, it is necessary to wish them away, but your wish has no efficacy unless you grasp what it involves. The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions –notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful–are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy.

~ George Orwell

But unfortunately you get no further by merely wishing class-distinctionsaway. More exactly, it is necessary to wish them away, but your wish has noefficacy unless you grasp what it involves. The fact that has got to be faced isthat to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here amI, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want toget rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result ofclass-distinctions. All my notions –notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant,of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful–are essentially middle-classnotions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my tablemanners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements ofmy body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special nicheabout half-way up the social hierarchy.

~ George Orwell

The rich believe that their money will insulate them from setbacks and frustrations, and that's one of the absurdist expectations of all.

~ (Alain De Botton)

The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own.

~ Daniel Kahneman

The price we pay for being different may be severe.

~ Unknown

People whose eyes shine are happy to be alive. They see life and it’s glory even when things aren’t easy.And because they see life, even through all the problems and obstacles, their eyes shine.

~ Jelena Pantić

Aronson's first law:People who do crazy things are not necessarily crazy.

~ Elliot Aronson

Anything that tends to make us elated is inevitably going to throw us into depression.

~ Eknath Easwaran

Deeply entrenched fantasies and persistent, most cherished illusions can at least partly be explained as ‘bugs’ or ‘viruses’ in, or ‘mis-activations’ of, our sophisticated and highly sensitive intellectual software, which is driven but also easily disrupted by, and addicted to, our restless and insatiable need for meaning, order, control, and reassurance.

~ Azar Gat

Most people are asleep and need to be confronted, like adults that are still behaving like they're 5 years old, and don't want to assume responsibility for their mistakes.

~ Robin Sacredfire

I always imagined that you might write something about me. I wanted to leave an imprint on your life. I don’t want to be “just another patient”. I wanted to be “special”. I want to be something, anything. I feel like nothing, no one. If I left an imprint on your life, maybe I would be someone, someone you wouldn’t forget. I’d exist then. (Marge’s letter to Yalom)

~ Irvin D. Yalom

For a man, the optimal evolutionary strategy is to disseminate his genes as widely as possible, given his few minutes (or, alas, seconds) of investment in each encounter. It all makes simple evolutionary sense, since a woman invests a good deal of time and effort -a nine month long, risky, strenuous pregnancy, in each offspring. Naturally she has to be very discerning in her choice of sexual partners.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Today we are living the grotesque spectacle of the poisoningof the earth by the nineteenth-century hero system of unrestrainedmaterial production. This is perhaps the greatest and most pervasiveevil to have emerged in all of history, and it may eveneventually defeat all of mankind. Still there are no twisted peoplewhom we can hold responsible for this.

~ Ernest Becker

That just seems to be the way we’re built.

~ Irvin D. Yalom

Narcissistic cathexis of the child by the mother does not exclude emotional devotion. On the contrary, she loves the child as her self-object, excessively, though not in the manner that he needs, and always on the condition that he presents his false self. This is no obstacle to the development of intellectual abilities, but it is one to the unfolding of an authentic emotional life.

~ Alice Miller

Speculation was now news. News had been confused with fact. Fact had been replaced by expert opinion. People had been replaced by their biographies. Ability had been replaced by disability. Thinking had been replaced by psychology. History had been reduced to story. And while the news media pumped out a new story every week on things that could kill you, Hollywood simultaneously created stories that showed that everything could be prevailed over. Meaning, he said, was so malleable that it could be turned inside out, and no one would know the difference—and it would—and, just like the universe that had expanded to its maximum size, everything that had ever been would happen in reverse and revert back to its original form until existence would disappear without leaving a trace of itself as the Big Bang backfired.

~ John M. Keller

There was a time when Men functioned through the mind and Women from their heart, now its Men who feel more and women think more...

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

Life is stress by definition.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.

~ Donna Tartt

Philosophically speaking, values are the termini of our intentions. We never fully achieve them.

~ Gordon W. Allport

A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. It may well be that interpreting the first in terms of the latter motivates a doctor to bury his patient's existential despair under a heap of tranquilizing drugs. It is his task, rather , to pilot the patient through his existential crises of growth and development.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better and better problems.

~ Gordon W. Allport

Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

Love is as primary a phenomenon as sex. Normally, sex is a mode of expression for love. Sex is justified, even sanctified, as soon as, but only as long as, it is a vehicle of love. Thus love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex; rather, sex is a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness which is called love.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

There is a widespread belief about quantum mechanics, as also about relativity, that it is something that one is entitled to ignore for most ordinary philosophical and scientific purposes, since it only seriously applies at the micro level of reality; where 'micro' means something far smaller than would show up in any conventional microscope. What sits on top of this micro level, so the assumption runs, is a sufficiently good approximation of the old classical Newtonian picture to justify our continuing, as philosophers, to think about the world in essentially classical terms. I believe this to be a fundamental mistake. What I shall be arguing...is that the world is quantum-mechanical through and through; and that the classical picture of reality is, even at the microscopic level, deeply inadequate.

~ Stephen T. Deberry

[M]ental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental wellbeing.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

we do not ask. We want to be told. One of the most curious things in the structure of our psyche is that we all want to be told because we are the result of the propaganda of ten thousand years. We want to have our thinking confirmed and corroborated by another, whereas to ask a question is to ask it of yourself.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

You -have- to love your monster.

~ Philippa Dowding

Feelings are not to be suppressed or fixed — they’re to be acknowledged.

~ Jennifer Lane

we all try to silence painful emotions. but when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us and why.

~ Stephen Grosz

The human being is so complicated in some ways, and yet so simple in others. Sometimes, we need complex medication regimens. Yet, sometimes, we just need a good cry.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Psychology is a condensed version of mindset, whereas philosophy is an abstract of the human society.

~ Pearl Zhu

People it seems, are busy leading their lives into the future, whereas psychology, for the most part, is busy tracing them into the past.

~ Gordon W. Allport

Psychotherapy and counselling should make people aware of themselves and of the difficulties which they face. This then gives them the freedom to choose for themselves. In this sense, unlike behaviour therapy, psychotherapy is value-free: no advice, suggestions or recriminations are given. Indeed the only value of psychotherapy is respect for the individual. Such respect, however, in a mechanistic and objectifying society ... becomes a political act.

~ Paul Kline

Want to do something noble and courageous while you're on this Earth treat the mentally ill like they have some worth.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

The danger of refusing to reflect upon the psychological dynamics of faith and belief is that what we feel to be self evidently true, for psychological reasons, might be, upon inspection, highly questionable, intellectually or morally. Too often, as we all know, the 'feeling of rightness' trumps sober reflection and moral discernment. Further, we are often unwilling to listen to others until we are, to some degree, psychologically open to persuasion. The Parable of the Sower comes to mind.

~ Richard Beck

In short, the Lord's Supper was the realization of new social and political arrangements, the embodiment of the social leveling seen in Jesus' ministry, most profoundly in his acts of table fellowship. Importantly, as we have seen, these new social arrangements could only be achieved if the emotions of social stratification were confronted, eliminated, or reinterpreted. In his body metaphor, Paul dramatically reframes these heretical emotions, the emotions of contempt, disgust, honor, and social presentability. Rather, than signaling exclusion and division - the natural expulsive impulse inherent in these emotions - Paul suggests that these emotions should signal just the opposite in the Kingdom of God: honor, care, and embrace.

~ Richard Beck