Psychology Quotes

Timidity is a fault for which it is dangerous to reprove persons whom we wish to correct of it.

For those who need consolation no means of consolation is so effective as the assertion that in their case no consolation is possible: it implies so great a degree of distinction that they at once hold up their heads again.

With throbbing veins and burning skin, eyes wild and heavy, thoughts hurried and disordered, he felt as though the light were a reproach, and shrunk involuntarily from the day as if he were some foul and hideous thing.

As Michael (Chekhov)'s pupil, I learned more about acting. I learned psychology, history, and the good manners of art - taste.

The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you.

That's maybe the reason he does so many things so that he will not have to think .

We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing.

The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community.

I think that Jean Houston has broken through to a new understanding of the sense and uses of inward-turned contemplation-a n understanding that leaves the Freudian schools of technique and theory far behind. The accent is not on the curing of disease but on the enlargement, rather, of our health.

What you resist persist.

I analyzed you, though you did not adore me.

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

You fail in your thoughts, or you prevail in your thoughts only.

The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind - whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity: for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves.

There are men in the world who derive an exaltation from the proximity of disaster and ruin, as other from success.

It's not people who resent successful people; it's resentful people who resent successful people.

Shame has poor memory.

Regarding the psychological, your goal must not be "I need to lose X pounds" but "I'm going to regain my identity," whether as an athlete, a conservative, a sexual being, a together person, whatever.

He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.

If you're going to solve a weight-loss problem - or smoking problem for that matter - you must address both the psychological and physiological.

The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them.

To study the abnormal is the best way of understanding the normal.

Normal fear protects us; abnormal fear paralyses us. Normal fear motivates us to improve our individual and collective welfare; abnormal fear constantly poisons and distorts our inner lives. Our problem is not to be rid of fear but, rather to harness and master it.

Well, one of the problems about being psychoanalyzed is, as Nietzsche said, "Be careful lest in casting out your devils that you cast out the best thing that's in you." So many people who are really in deep analysis look as though and act as though they have been filleted. There's no bone there, there's no stuff! How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!

Shakespeare is a great psychologist, and whatever can be known of the heart of man may be found in his plays.

i discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.

It's so hard to make a good tee shot after a birdie.

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Aristoteles quidem ait: 'Omnes ingeniosos melancholicos esse.' Aristotle says that all men of genius are melancholy.

There is a syndrome in sports called 'paralysis by analysis.'

The people we keep standing in the anteroom of our favor either start fermenting or turn sour.

The mind always fails first, not the body. The secret is to make your mind work for you, not against you.

Few men are killed by the bayonet, many are scared by it. Bayonets should be fixed when the fire fight starts

The difference between acting badly or brilliantly is not based on your ability, but on the state of your mind and/or body in any given moment.

The squaring of the circle is a stage on the way to the unconscious, a point of transition leading to a goal lying as yet unformulated beyond it. It is one of those paths to the centre.

Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.

It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association

Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.

Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself.

The total possible consciousness may be split into parts which co-exist but mutually ignore each other.

It isn't the American white man who is a racist, but it's the American political, economic and social atmosphere that automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.

Freedom of Will-that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order-who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them. In this way the person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful underwills or under-souls-indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls-to his feelings of delight as commander.

Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.

An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total.

Envy is a declaration of inferiority.

Men love to be the first to read the newspaper in the morning. Not being the first is upsetting to their psyches.

Enjoying praise is in some people merely a civility of the heart--and just the opposite of a vanity of the spirit.

A purely psychological explanation is ruled out... the discs show signs of intelligent guidance, by quasi-human pilots.

Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else unless it is an enemy.

Age is not based on chronology, but psychology.

When K. looked at the castle, often it seemed to him as if he were observing someone who sat quietly there in front of him gazing, not lost in thought and so oblivious of everything, but free and untroubled, as if he were alone with nobody to observe him, and yet must notice that he was observed, and all the same remained with his calm not even slightly disturbed; and really - one did not know whether it was cause or effect - the gaze of the observer could not remain concentrated there, but slid away.

There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.

Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.

Most people marry their mother. I married my father.

Hitler's unconscious seems to be female.

The nature of man is such that people consider themselves put under an obligation as much by the benefits they confer as by those they receive.

Not everyone coming to you with a problem wants a solution. They are attached to the attention it brings them.

People who say they don't care what people think are usually desperate to have people think they don't care what people think.

When facts are few, speculations are most likely to represent individual psychology.