Psychologist Quotes

In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential that we embody. If we do not embody that, life is wasted.

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

Deeply listening to music opens up new avenues of research I'd never even dreamed of. I feel from now on music should be an essential part of every analysis.

Your lifetime in form is to be honored and celebrated. Go beyond your enslavement, and live fully in the now, as this is the only time you have.

Usually, making excuses is just something we can get away with, rather than challenging or changing ourselves. If you want to change and you want your life to work at a level you've never had before, then take responsibility for it.

It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.

The true'to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.

Truth is what works.

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

My goodness, there's nothing that feels better than to meditate, than to get quiet, and then to be at peace, and to tell someone you love them.

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as the sculptor works on his block of stone.

I have no theory about dreams. I do not know how dreams arise. On the other hand, I know that if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly – if we take the boat with us and turn it over and over – something almost always comes out of it.

Ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.

Forgiveness means that you fill yourself with love and you radiate that love outward and refuse to hang onto the venom or hatred that was engendered by the behaviors that caused the wounds.

Habits are changed by practicing new behaviors, and this is true for mental habits as well.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, 'I'm an orphan again today, isn't this terrible? Poor me.'

If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

Trust that which gives you meaning and accept it as your guide

One is always in the dark about one's own personality. One needs others to get to know oneself.

By taking responsibility for how you choose to respond to anything or anyone, you're aligning yourself with the beautiful dance of life.

I did have a lot of lack, but I never experienced it. I grew up in the east side of Detroit, in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. Even growing up in an orphanage, I never woke up saying, "I'm an orphan again today, isn't this terrible? Poor me."

In order to forgive, you must have blamed.

A complex is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repitition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations.

All fanaticism is repressed doubt.

My favorite affirmation when I feel stuck or out of sorts is: Whatever I need is already here, and it is all for my highest good. Jot this down and post it conspicuously throughout your home, on the dashboard of your car, at your office, on your microwave oven, and even in front of your toilets!

Out of time we cut 'days' and 'nights', 'summers' and 'winters.' We say what, each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intelletual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the persceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

It is impossible for me to waste my time in helping another person.

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

When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.

True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate, and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that therefore is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.

Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or to attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.

We become what we think about all day long. The qustion is, "What do you think about?"

Guilt lies in the past, worry lies in the future.

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.

What other people think of me is none of my business. One of the highest places you can get to is being independent of the good opinions of other people.

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.

Resist the temptation to compare yourself to others. This is crucial in order to be able to manifest whatever you want.

The "through-and-through" universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable all-pervasiveness. Its necessity , with no possibilities; its relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights ... It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides.

Rejoice in the prosperity of others. When you feel contemptuous, or even a twinge of jealousy, toward the accomplishments or life-styles of others, you are harboring negativity where love must reside.

The individual disposition is already a factor in childhood; it is innate, and not acquired in the course of a life.

It is my mind, with its store of images, that gives the world color and sound; and that supremely real and rational certainty which I can "experience" is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images. Thus there is, in a certain sense, nothing that is directly experienced except the mind itself. Everything is mediated through the mind, translated, filtered, allegorized, twisted, even falsified by it. We are . . . enveloped in a cloud of changing and endlessly shifting images.

Wisdom is learning what to overlook.

No language exists that cannot be misused... Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.

Fear of Failure becomes Fear of Success for those who Never Try Anything New.

But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.

Judgment means that you view the world as you are, rather than as it is.

I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once and cannot add up the sum.

Genius is a potential that lives within you and every other human being. You have many moments of genius in your lifetime. These are the times when you have a uniquely brilliant idea and implement it even if only you are aware of how fantastic it is.

If only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists of watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy.

A lot of people have a sense-of-entitlement mentality that somebody else ought to do these things for them. People are mad at the government for not getting jobs for them. I don't understand why it's the government's responsibility.

Surround yourself with people who are doers!

Having a mind that is open to everything and attached to nothing seems to me to be one of the most basic principles that you can adopt to contribute to individual and world peace.

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

Where quality is the thing sought after, the thing of supreme quality is cheap, whatever the price one has to pay for it.

Writing is like anything else - the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you'll be about what's going to happen to it, where it's going, what it sounds like, whether it's right.

If you still are growing, you go through the archetype of the statesman or stateswoman. You stop asking "What are my quotas?" and stop saying "What is in it for me?" and "How much can I get?" You begin to say, instead, "What are your quotas?" and, "How may I serve?" Providing for others becomes much more important in your life than what you can get for yourself.

Choose a self and stand by it.

Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.