Psychology Quotes

As a result of a general defect of nature, we are either more confident or more fearful of unusual and unknown things.

We are so full of apprehensions, fears, that we don't know exactly to what it points... a great change of our psychoglocal attitude is imminent, that is certain...because we need more understanding of human nature because ...the only real danger that exists is man himself... and we know nothing of man - his psyche should be studied because we are the origin of all coming evil.

Psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back.

Certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain... Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.

Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.

Freud was way off base in considering sex the fundamental motivation. The ruling passion in men is minding each other's business.

The forces of adversaries are more diminished by the loss of those who flee than of those who are killed.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Hate and love are very similar emotions. The opposite of love is you don't care.

All thoughts start from emotions.

Whatever people do, they do for a reason and they think that it meets their needs....by their perception.

One does not hate so long as one continues to rate low, but only when one has come to rate equal or higher.

Annoyance is a physical malady that is in no way cured just because the annoying situation that causes it is eliminated.

Her laugh was sad and taciturn, seemingly detached from any feeling of the moment, like something she kept in the cupboard and took out only when she had to, using it with no feeling of ownership, as if the infrequency of her smiles had made her forget the normal way to use them.

We don't laugh because we're happy - we're happy because we laugh.

The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life.

Coaches who can outline plays on a black board are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their player and motivate.

There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.

There is only one universal passion fear.

It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.

In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease--a terrible passing inclination to die of it.

The surest aid in combating the male's disease of self-contempt is to be loved by a clever woman.

Envy and jealousy are the private parts of the human soul. Perhaps the comparison can be extended.

If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us. --"The Content of the Psychoses

There is a lot of ignorance, and I don't mean intellectual ignorance. I mean people think that if you get something, it will take away from what I have. It's just ignorance.

The most that can be said of flattery is that it is sometimes a cheap psychological trick with which charlatans and dishonest people lull others into a state of carelessness while they pick their pockets.

There are instances when we are like horses, we psychologists, and grow restless: we see our own shadow wavering up and down before us. A psychologist must look away from himself in order to see anything at all.

No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity.

We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.

The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are so truth-like and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

The existence of forgetting has never been proved: We only know that some things don't come to mind when we want them.

With the unknown, one is confronted with danger, discomfort, and care; the first instinct is to abolish these painful states. First principle: any explanation is better than none. . . . The causal instinct is thus conditional upon, and excited by, the feeling of fear. The "why?" shall, if at all possible, not give the cause for its own sake so much as for a particular kind of cause -- a cause that is comforting, liberating, and relieving.

We take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things.

He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.

Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from Birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.

If you're aware when it's going on, you can deal with it and change it. If you're not aware of it, you'll be mystified at the states that come and go seemingly without reason.

The fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain.

I have frequently seen people become neurotic when they content themselves with inadequate or wrong answers to the questions of life.

Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such.

The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and effectiveness. His habit of mind becomes that of a commander who has lost a decisive and calamitous battle. He quite trusts himself thereafter.

We create success or failure on the course primarily by our thoughts.

Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.

What a teacher needs to know about psychology "might almost be written on the palm of one's hand."

Our vanity would have just that which we do best count as that which is hardest for us. The origin of many a morality.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.

If there's anything you want to do and you can't figure out why you're not doing it, there's a simple answer: you link more pain to doing it than not doing it. Hey, if you don't have enough money, for example I know that's an issue for a lot of people. It was for a good deal of my life. If you don't have money there's only one reason: you link more pain to having more money than to not having it.

Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself.

Passionate people invariably deny their anger, and cowards often boast their ignorance of fear.

It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call something there, more deep and more general than any of the special and particular senses by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.

...the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.

People will do more to avoid pain than they will do to gain pleasure.

We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often.

paranoia is just a heightened sense of awareness

The first lecture in psychology that I ever heard was the first I ever gave.