#Psychology Quotes

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

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

“I think a curse should rest on me - because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment - and yet - I can't help it - I enjoy every second of 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.”

“There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?”

“Logic won't change an emotion but action will.”

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

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

“Once a need is satisfied, it is no longer a motivator. Satisfaction does not increase motivation”

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

“If, however, there is to be a war of nerves let us make sure our nerves are strong and are fortified by the deepest convictions of our hearts.”

“People don't buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.”

“A smart salesperson listens to emotions not facts.”

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

“If Freud had worn a kilt in the prescribed Highland manner he might have had a very different attitude to genitals.”

“The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

“Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.”

“a man does not cry because he is sad, he is sad because he cries”

“The deepest longing in the human breast is the desire for appreciation.”

“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.”

“The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others.”

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

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

“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.”

“But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.”

“The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.”

“Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.”

“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.”

“When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.”

“There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that constitute our inner life.”

“A woman can make a man feel older or younger than his years if she so chooses. Being a woman is a terribly difficult task since it consists principally in dealing with men. Women were made with a sense of humor so they could love men instead of laughing at them.”

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

“We are mere bundles of habits.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teacher.”

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

“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.”

“Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively.”

“The most powerful force in the human psyche is people's need for their words and actions to stay consistent with their IDENTITY - how we define ourselves.”

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

“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.”

“It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to a teacher.”

“Consciousness... does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. Source of the expression 'stream of consciousness'.”

“Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.”

“The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a psychologist.”

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

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