Psychology Quotes

At the beginning of this War megalomania was the only form of sanity.

A smart salesperson listens to emotions not facts.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

Fear kills more people than death.

Idleness is the parent of psychology.

Reckoned physiologically, everything ugly weakens and afflicts man. It recalls decay, danger, impotence; he actually suffers a loss of energy in its presence. The effect of the ugly can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever man feels in any way depressed, he senses the proximity of something ugly. His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride - they decline with the ugly, they increase with the beautiful.

True Islam taught me that it takes all of the religious, political, economic, psychological, and racial ingredients, or characteristics, to make the Human Family and the Human Society complete.

If one uses one's intellect to become master over the unlimited emotions, it may produce a sorry and diversionary effect upon the intellect.

Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody. . . . And emotions that come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.

But when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring presence and can make their exercises interesting, whilst others simply cannot. And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper spring of human personality to conduct the task.

If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you'll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.

It is a great mistake to suppose that thrift is caused only by fear; it springs from hope as well as from fear; where there is no hope, be sure there will be no thrift.

To be a successful soldier you must know history. . . . What you must know is how man reacts. Weapons change but man who uses them changes not at all. To win battles you do not beat weapons - you beat the soul of man of the enemy man.

Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?

The common belief that coaches must be abusive to be successful is a myth. Research shows that if you find a task fun, you'll perform better. If more coaches took . . . a Golden Rule approach to coaching, treating their players the way they themselves would like to be treated, fewer athletes would drop out of sports in their teens, and more athletes at every level would be happier and more satisfied.

Love of flattery, in most men, proceeds from the mean opinion they have of themselves; in women, from the contrary.

What we focus on determines how we feel. And how we feel - our state of mind - powerfully influences our actions and interactions.

When our brain feels too weak to deal with our opponent's objections, our heart answers by casting suspicion on their underlying motives.

I believe therapy can be done more rapidly. I'm into your finding the source of what's making you think and feel the way you do and shifting it quickly.

The white man is not inherently evil, but America's racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

The radical hostility, the deadly hostility against sensuality, is always a symptom to reflect on: it entitles us to suppositions concerning the total state of one who is excessive in this manner.

You can't stand to see your neighbor getting rich. You know you're smarter than he is and he's doing these things and he's getting rich.

Beat your opponent where he is strongest, and you demoralize him.

The total mental efficiency of a man is the resultant of the working together of all his faculties. He is too complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed. Concentration, memory, reasoning power, inventiveness, excellence of the senses, all are subsidiary to this.

The term "self" seems a suitable one for the unconscious substrate whose actual exponent in consciousness is the ego. The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors that radiate outward from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it. The self, like the unconscious, as an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego. It is not I who create myself; rather, I happen to myself.

At Real, psychological pressure on the players is much more serious than at United. This is good. At many clubs, you don't know the consequence of playing badly.

The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing.

I'm interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

When a man has just been greatly honored and has eaten a little he is the most generous.

Two armies are two bodies which meet and try to frighten each other.

Sanity is very rare; every man almost and every woman has a dash of madness.

Psychologists have hitherto failed to realize that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.

Directing is more like you're being a psychologist and you're kind of analyzing the situation and evaluating each person for their idiosyncrasies.

The sense of doing good , the satisfaction of being right, the joy of looking favorably upon oneself, dear sir, are powerful levers for keeping us upright and making us progress. On the other hand, if men are deprived of that feeling, they are changed into rabid dogs.

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance.

I spend a hell of a lot of time killing animals and fish so I wouldn't kill myself. When a man is in rebellion against death, as I am in rebellion against death, he gets pleasure out of taking to himself one of the godlike attributes; that of giving it.

The best client is a scared millionaire.

Don't take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, to the next county, to a foreign country, but NOT to where the guilt is.

The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, emotions.

The things we fear the most have already happened to us.

Basically, you can live your life in one of two ways. You can let your brain run you the way it has in the past. You can let it flash any picture or sound or feeling, and you can respond automatically on cue, like a Pavlovian dog resp‎onding to a bell. Or you can choose to consciously run your brain yourself. You can implant the cues you want. You can take bad experiences and sap them of their strength and power. You can represent them to yourself in a way that no longer overpowers you, a way that "cuts them down" to a size where you know you can effectively handle things.

All extremes of feeling are allied to madness.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.

Who doesn't desire his fathers death?

Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.

If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden in mine - which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity - it is the key to many reservations.

That is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.

Any physical addiction, it doesn't matter how long they've been taking it or how full of it their body is, and addiction, would, between three and thirty days, be completely cleared from the system. Usually closer to three days than thirty days. But it is the emotional craving that must be tended to.

All animals are to be found in men and each of theme exists in some man, sometimes several at the time.

We are constituted a good deal like chickens, which, taken from the hen, and put in a basket of cotton in the chimney-corner, willoften peep till they die, nevertheless; but if you put in a book, or anything heavy, which will press down the cotton, and feel like the hen, they go to sleep directly.

It is one of those problems of human nature, which may be noted down, but not solved; - although Ralph felt no remorse at that moment for his conduct towards the innocent, true-hearted girl; although his libertine clients had done precisely what he had expected, precisely what he most wished, and precisely what would tend most to his advantage, still he hated them for doing it, from the very bottom of his soul.

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

I realize now that there's a strength in dunking that I can use to my advantage. When you dunk all the time it isn't as demoralizing to the opponent, but when you dunk at a key moment in the game you can use it to change the momentum.

Above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves itself into the idea of psychological superiority.

A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook, that the sketch of the angry professor had been made in anger. Anger had snatched my pencil while I dreamt. But what was anger doing there? Interest, confusion, amusement, boredom--all these emotions I could trace and name as they succeeded each other throughout the morning. Had anger, the black snake, been lurking among them? Yes, said the sketch, anger had.

Effective leaders have the ability to consistently move themselves and others to action because they understand the “invisible forces” that shape us

I know the signs of scaredness.