Psychology Quotes

Disappointment cannot exist without expectation. “The expected apricot is never as sweet when it reaches the mouth.

~ Idries Shah

There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.

~ Alain De Botton

Narrow behaviourist thinkingpermeates political and social policy and medical practice, thechildrearing advice dispensed by “parenting experts” and academicdiscourse. We keep trying to change people’s behaviours without a fullunderstanding of how and why those behaviours arise. “Inner causesare not the proper domain of psychology,” writes Roy Wise, an experton the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in theNational Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seemsastonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be nounderstanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings,without looking at “inner causes,” tricky as those causes can be to pindown at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, areoften the active representations of emotional states and of specialkinds of brain functioning.As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brainpatterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment.Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with varioussocial and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must striveto change not them but their environments. These are the only thingswe can change. Transformation of the addict must come from withinand the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is muchthat we can do.

~ Gabor Maté

A Sufi school comes into being in order to flourish and disappear, not to leave traces in mechanical ritual, or anthropologically survivals.

~ Idries Shah

To embrace love, we risk heartbreak. To resist love, we risk emptiness.

~ Jennifer Lane

I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.College transported me to a new town, where I tried, one more time, to reinvent myself. Becoming someone new, I could correct the errors of my past. At first I was optimistic: I could pull it off. But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change. Over and over I made the same mistake, hurt other people, and hurt myself in the bargain.Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I've lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I'd committed—maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being. I'd hit rock bottom, and I knew it.

~ Haruki Murakami

If you're rational you don't get to believe whatever you want to believe.

~ Michael Huemer

A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far - and our blindness is extremely dangerous.

~ C.g. Jung

Confirmation bias is the most effective way to go on living a lie.

~ Criss Jami

The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgement go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, its danger diminishes. The dissociation of personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the night-time sides of the psyche, cease with progressive assimilation.

~ C.g. Jung

Do not think that your magic ring will work if you are not yourself Solomon.

~ Idries Shah

We all feel that the opposite of our own highest principle must be purely destructive, deadly, and evil. We refuse to endow it with any positive life-force; hence we avoid and fear it.

~ C.g. Jung

The virtues developed here in the age range [around the age of 2] of are trust or faith, and will power and self determination according to the Erickson model. The existential questions being addressed here in this stage are, can one trust the world? and, is it alright to be myself?

~ Leviak B. Kelly

Another potent ideological force is to deprecate the individual and exalt the collectivity of society. For since any given rule implies majority acceptance, any ideological danger to that rule can only start from one or a few independently-thinking individuals. The new idea, much less the new critical idea, must needs begin as a small minority opinion; therefore, the State must nip the view in the bud by ridiculing any view that defies the opinions of the mass. “Listen only to your brothers” or “adjust to society” thus become ideological weapons for crushing individual dissent. By such measures, the masses will never learn of the nonexistence of their Emperor’s clothes.

~ Murray N. Rothbard

The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself.

~ C.g. Jung

EXPECTATION If, from time to time, you give up expectation, you will be able to perceive what it is you are getting.

~ Idries Shah

Try and set yourself the task not to think of a white bear, and the cursed thing comes to mind every minute.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You must improve yourself on a higher level if you are to be able to help people, and not just weep over them.

~ Idries Shah

If you say it very softly, with a smile, you can get away with saying almost anything, even the truth.

~ Neel Burton

May you find grace to endure every circumstance.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There is something in man which can detect real love. We rub it out, or muffle it, by substitute-love.

~ Idries Shah

The liar has a bad memory.

~ Idries Shah

We tend to suppress our anger against each other which ultimately leads to big quarrels some day. If two people have been naturally expressing their differences of opinion or having small arguments on regular basis, they will never have resentment or enmity of a lifetime.

~ Deep Trivedi

But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!

~ C.g. Jung

Worldview is often confused with perception; rather, it is our perception that influences our worldview.

~ Asa Don Brown

The Thing about people who wanted to show you things was that sometimes their interest in granting you knowledge was laced with a little voyeuristic sadism. They were waiting for the Look or the Reaction, and they didn’t care what it was so long as it inflicted some kind of discomfort.

~ Jeff Vandermeer

Whatever I fed to his mind, thinking it was nutrition was, in fact, poison. No matter how much a person likes or craves sugar, he should not be raised on the diet of only sugar ~ Rudransh Kashyap

~ Kirtida Gautam

Think or don't think, but don't think that you are thinking when you are postulating.

~ Kirtida Gautam

I am not the Hero of this story Bob is~ Aarush Kashyap

~ Kirtida Gautam

I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

~ Haruki Murakami

As a nation we should look more carefully at how our fear of future acts of terrorism is undermining our quality of life.

~ Bruce H. Lipton

The person who says it is lonely at the top has no idea what the view looks like from above. ~ Aarush Kashyap

~ Kirtida Gautam

If I wanted you to understand, I would have explained it better ~ Aarush Kashyap

~ Kirtida Gautam

I get happy and I get sad,just like anybody elsebut they call this a disorder.

~ Casey Renee Kiser

I see love as a force of nature. No matter how much you want to, you cannot control or demand love. No one can. It cannot be bought, bartered, or sold. It is priceless.

~ Anna Agoncillo

Perception and worldview are one's summary of life.

~ Asa Don Brown

Competence is the most effective tool to hide madness. Black holes actually appear to be the brightest stars in sky. ~ Aarush Kashyap

~ Kirtida Gautam

The essential quality of a market system, contrary to popular thinking, is not that it promotes greed; but rather, that it renders greed harmless.

~ Israel M. Kirzner

People are perfectly capable of giving love even if they feel less confident about themselves.

~ Anna Agoncillo

In terms of monetary behavior, there are two types of people in this Earth: those who save and those who spend.

~ Anna Agoncillo