Psychology Quotes

Life has ceased to be lived in a closed world the center of which was man; the world has become limitless and at the same time threatening. By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life. He is threatened by powerful superpersonal forces, capital and the market. His relationship to his fellow men, with everyone a potential competitor, has become hostile and estranged; he is free - that is, he is alone, isolated, threatened from all sides. [H]e is overwhelmed with a sense of his individual nothingness and helplessness. Paradise is lost for good, the individual stands alone and faces the world - a stranger thrown into a limitless and threatening world. The new freedom is bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.

~ Erich Fromm

But who knows why we really do anything? Who knows why we do what we do when we do it? Why your local barista greeted you with a curt 'hi' instead of her usual, mellifluous-sounding 'hello' has a trillion justifications. So, why someone decides to commit suicide might take a while to explain, and a lifetime to begin comprehending...

~ Samuel Armen

The wind considers how trauma is - in essence - just a memory that violates previous memories too barbarically, an event that devastatingly conflicts against everything else one knows.

~ Samuel Armen

When you're anxious, don't immediately trust your automatic thoughts because oftentimes these thoughts are irrational. Thoughts are not facts. They're just thoughts and sometimes don't need to be given so much importance.

~ John Tsilimparis

Only those person who learned to like themselves can be generous and friendly with others.

~ Les Giblin

To transcend nature, to be alienated from nature and from another human being, finds man naked, ashamed. He is alone and free, yet powerless and afraid.

~ Erich Fromm

Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.

~ Idries Shah

She spoke to him of her problems, and that made him forget his own. She told him that he was intelligent, thoughtful, becoming, and deeply magnetic - everything he wanted so badly for her to see in him. Attention is the greatest gift when you're too afraid to pay it to yourself, the wind ruminates.

~ Samuel Armen

Relationships must be fostered as far as possible and maintained, and thus a morbid transference can be avoided.

~ Carl Jung

All of material and All of any services can be purchased, with the exception of, Love, Peace and Joy, they are not for sale at any price

~ I. Alan Appt

Real communication occurs...when we listen with understanding. What does this mean? It means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person's point of view, to sense how it feels to him, to achieve his frame of reference in regard to the thing he is talking about.

~ Carl Rogers

Why do people always wonder whether books are any good, without wondering whether they are themselves in a state to profit from them?

~ Idries Shah

Experimental studies consistently point out that the popular remedy for anger, ventilation, is really worse than useless. In fact, the reverse seems to be true: expressing anger tends to make you even angrier and solidifies an angry attitude.

~ Judith Mckay

When you love someone you have chosen to relinquish a part of yourself in order to inherit a part of them, and what perpetuates that love is the feeling of confident appreciation for such a potentially debilitating trade. That's why heartbreak feels like a sudden void.

~ Samuel Armen

For all the normal people who make fun of the mentally ill it's spelled K.A.R.M.A. and it's pronounced your days coming, Bitch!

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

If others are judgmental and do not appreciate your life's work, don't be dejected. Try to see the incapability of others who are unable to understand the things you understand, and appreciate the capability of seeing something which is not visible to others.

~ Ashish Mandlik

If someone asks you a question and you don't know the answer, belittle them. It's better to be an asshole than look stupid.

~ John Lefevre

When a monkey loses a banana to a rival, he feels bad, but he doesn't expand the problem by thinking about it over and over. He looks for another banana. He ends up feeling rewarded rather than harmed. Humans use their extra neurons to construct theories about bananas and end up constructing pain.

~ Loretta Graziano Breuning

Psychology which explains everything, explains nothing.

~ Marianne Moore

It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat’s maze poorly.

~ Richard K. Morgan

Beyond the satiation level of income, you can buy more pleasurable experiences, but you will lose some of your ability to enjoy the less expensive ones.

~ Daniel M. Gilbert

Because of language, the thoughts we record today might reach into the future to influence the thinking of people not yet born.

~ Laura A. Freberg

When emotions are expressed...all systems are united and made whole. When emotions are repressed, denied, not allowed to be whatever they may be, our network pathways get blocked, stopping the flow of the vital feel-good, unifying chemicals that run both our biology and our behavior.

~ Candace B. Pert

I’m helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present

~ Krista Tippett

From a social psychological standpoint, the selfie phenomenon seems to stem from two basic human motives. The first is to attract attention from other people. Because people’s positive social outcomes in life require that others know them, people are motivated to get and maintain social attention. By posting selfies, people can keep themselves in other people’s minds. In addition, like all photographs that are posted on line, selfies are used to convey a particular impression of oneself. Through the clothes one wears, one’s expression, staging of the physical setting, and the style of the photo, people can convey a particular public image of themselves, presumably one that they think will garner social rewards.

~ Mark R. Leary

There's no point in fighting for a woman that is rude and boring, just because she's hot. Such woman shortens your lifespan.

~ Daniel Marques

Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology.

~ Erich Fromm

Man's nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.

~ Erich Fromm

But I'll tell you secret. Something even a lot of grownups haven't figured out yet,' Miss Taylor leaned forward and whispered 'When we face our fears, we take their power away.

~ Bobby Nelson

All men are troublesome but some are more troublesome than others.All women are troubles although, some are more of a trouble than others.

~ Prinx Maurice

Pride has quite a bit to do with hatred. In many a case in which one hates another, one subconsciously begins patterns of cherry-picking and selective hearing: he continues to look only for things about the other person which he can use to justify his hatred, things which will then make him feel less guilty about hating someone. In this regard, hatred is not so much an emotion as it is a decision.

~ Criss Jami

A psychologist’s job (if it’s done well) is to get you to seriously laugh at yourself.

~ Clifford Cohen

Brains are like toddlers. They are wonderful and should be treasured, but that doesn't mean you should trust them to take care of you in an avalanche or process serotonin effectively.

~ Jenny Lawson

Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language―a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.

~ Jonathan Haidt

But in practice, every psychological confession has religious significance, and every religious confession, whether ritual and sacramental or free, its psychological effects. It is perhaps in this fact that we perceive most clearly the unity of the human being, and how impossible it is to dissociate the physical, psychological and religious aspects of his life. Every doctor, even without specializing in psychotherapy, in so far as he has understanding of what is human and likes contact with human beings, may suddenly find himself promoted to a confessor's priesthood without having sought it.

~ Paul Tournier

Something in me whispered that I needed to stop thinking, that I should above all not go too farwith thinking. But that never worked; I always thought things through to the end, to their mostextreme consequence.

~ Herman Koch

Jealousy is the opposite of maintaining and growing in a relationship. Jealousy includes elements of fear, anger, suspicion, and control that have no place in a mature relationship.

~ Darrel Ray

Regardless the options you have, the most important thing is to choose consciously. Don't let ancient religious programming dictate your emotional and intellectual responses. You are a biological and social creature living in a biological and social world. Recognizing this gives you the power to make more rational decisions about how you want to enjoy the only life you have.

~ Darrel Ray

Well-meant techniques such as arbitrary self-mortification, are useless.

~ Idries Shah

All evil seems to arise from the desire to dominate others. Most men in our society are taught from a very early age to try to dominate. It isn’t something that they think about consciously. It operates at a subconscious level. They are taught by the adults around them and their peers. Someone dominates them and they in turn try to dominate others. They do it without even realizing it and they do it without even thinking about why. It is without question. In their conscious awareness they may aspire to grandiose ideals but their actions speak for what really motivates them from a subconscious level.

~ Mark Alberto Yoder Nunez